MontePython: Implementing Quantum Monte Carlo using Python

Abstract

We present a cross-language C++/Python program for simulations of quantum mechanical systems with the use of Quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) methods. We describe a system for which to apply QMC, the algorithms of variational Monte Carlo and diffusion Monte Carlo and we describe how to implement theses methods in pure C++ and C++/Python. Furthermore we check the efficiency of the implementations in serial and parallel cases to show that the overhead using Python can be negligible.