For the past few years a growing collection of data structures and algorithms tailored for quantum mechanics has been developed under the name TBTK. The aim is to significantly simplify the development of applications that perform quantum mechanical calculations. With particular focus on providing well thought through and efficient general purpose data structures for problems formulated on second-quantized form, the goal is to enable the scientific community to write codes that are much easier to integrate with each other. This is something that will be essential for bringing on the second quantum revolution.
Documentation and preprint
In preparation of this release, significant effort has gone into documenting the code and making sure that it is as easy as possible to get started. As part of this documentation effort, a preprint has recently been published on arXiv. A quick introduction is also available in the README on the projects GitHub page and in the blog post Introduction to TBTK – A software development kit for quantum mechanical calculations. Further, a much more extensive manual and API can be built from the source or accessed immediately at second-quantization.com.
The significance of v1.0.0
The release of v1.0.0 marks an important point where the code has stabilized enough that a more structured development process will be adopted. In particular this means that changes that break the API will only be allowed in new versions of TBTK where the major version number is incremented. That is, developers can from now on be confident that code written in v1.0.0 will be compatible with all future releases with a version number v1.x.y. The second version number will be incremented if significant extensions are added, while the last version number is reserved for bug fixes etc.