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Recent developments in the PySCF program package.

Qiming Sun,Xing Zhang,46 Authors,G. Chan

2020 · DOI: 10.1063/5.0006074
Journal of Chemical Physics · 1,217 Citations

TLDR

The design and philosophy behind PySCF, a Python-based general-purpose electronic structure platform that supports first-principles simulations of molecules and solids as well as accelerates the development of new methodology and complex computational workflows, is explained.

Abstract

PySCF is a Python-based general-purpose electronic structure platform that supports first-principles simulations of molecules and solids as well as accelerates the development of new methodology and complex computational workflows. This paper explains the design and philosophy behind PySCF that enables it to meet these twin objectives. With several case studies, we show how users can easily implement their own methods using PySCF as a development environment. We then summarize the capabilities of PySCF for molecular and solid-state simulations. Finally, we describe the growing ecosystem of projects that use PySCF across the domains of quantum chemistry, materials science, machine learning, and quantum information science.