Summer School on Path Integral Methods

Path Integrals in a cup of coffee

This summer school, that uses a hands-on approach to introduce doctoral and post-doctoral researchers to simulation techniques based on path integrals, has already been organized a couple of times at CECAM Headquarters at EPFL.

The 2016 CECAM/Psi-k School on Path Integral Quantum Mechanics: Theory, Simulation and Application, organized by Michele Ceriotti, Mariana Rossi, Tom Markland and Mark Tuckerman gathered together about 20 speakers and 45 participants from 14 countries, setting a milestone for the theory and practice of Path Integral techniques for the atomic-scale modelling of the quantum behavior of materials and molecules.

The 2018 CECAM/Psi-k School on Path Integral Quantum Mechanics: From the Basics to the Latest Developments has  been organized by Mariana Rossi, Jeremy Richardson, Michele Ceriotti and Tom Markland, and had a similarly diverse lineup of speakers and participants.

Theoretical classes have been complemented by hands-on practical sessions, during which participants learned how to set up and run (imaginary-time) path integral simulations with increasing levels of complexity.

Learning how to run PIMD simulations at CECAM/EPFL

PIMD Tutorial Environment

The handouts and the input files for the tutorial are available and will be updated on a git repository, or as a VirtualBox image that can be ran on any computer and contains all of the necessary programs and support files. Just install VirtualBox, download and unpack the archive containing the image and run it on whatever operative system you use (NB: you may need to  enable virtualization in the BIOS).

If you want to run the tutorials directly on your computer, you will need a Linux system with up-to-date libraries, a recent version of the CP2K and LAMMPS programs, a development version if i-PI as well as some of the post-processing tools available from our github page.

The tutorial environment on a USB key