Hello, I’m one of the authors of Kwant [1], a Python package for quantum transport in nanostructures. With this message I’d like to introduce myself and the package and ask to join the Debian Science team. I’m a staff researcher at the French CEA, the French national energy research organization. A Debian user since the days of “Hamm”, I’m a theoretical physicist by training, but nowadays I focus more on the computational side of research in our field. Quantum transport is a subfield of condensed matter physics that deals with how quantum quasiparticles (typically electrons, but could be also phonons for example) traverse nanoscale devices. We work at very low temperatures (a few Kelvin or even less), such that quantum effects are not overshadowed by thermal noise. Some hope that progress in our field will one day allow scalable solid-state quantum computation. Others are more cautious and simply point to the rich physics. The Kwant code is a Python package that is a collaboration between the French CEA and the Dutch TU Delft. We released the first version in 2013 and have been, slowly but steadily, continuing to maintain and improve the package. It has found wide adoption in the international community: the original Kwant paper has been [2] cited around 400 times, and the lion’s share of these corresponds to independent research articles that made use of Kwant. These numbers do not include use that did not lead to a publication, for example by students. Since 2013 we have been providing unofficial packages for Debian and Ubuntu, but I have the impression that the time is more than ripe to have Kwant included into Debian properly. Eventually, I would like to see Kwant and some related packages in Debian and available as backports. Since maintaining Kwant is part of my day job, I can make a long-term commitment to maintaining the packages in Debian. The first step has been taken by packaging “Tinyarray” [3] [4], a Python C extension module that Kwant relies on internally. Steffen Möller and Andreas Tille kindly helped to polish the packaging and sponsored the upload to the new queue. The next step would be to package Kwant itself [5], but since the opening of the ITP, one further dependency is needed for that: Qsymm [6]. Once Kwant is in Debian, it would be also nice to add Tkwant, a code that builds upon Kwant but can deal with time-dependent systems and has been released recently [7]. Kind regards Christoph Groth [1] https://kwant-project.org/ [2] https://arxiv.org/abs/1309.2926 [3] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=886628 [4] https://salsa.debian.org/python-team/packages/python-tinyarray [5] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=886418 [6] https://gitlab.kwant-project.org/qt/qsymm [7] https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.03132
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