We present Quantum Unfolding, a Fortran90 program for unfolding first-principles electronic energy bands. It unfolds energy bands accurately by handling the Fourier components of Bloch wavefunctions, which are reconstructed from Wannier functions from Wannier90. Due to the wide application of Wannier90 package and the possibility of focusing only on the most important energy bands, the present code works very conveniently.
We propose a new unfolding scheme to analyze energy spectra of complex large-scale systems which are inherently of multi-periodicity. Considering twisted bilayer graphene (tBLG) as an example, we first show that the conventional unfolding scheme in the past using a single primitive-cell representation causes serious problems in analyses of the energy spectra. We then introduce our multi-space representation scheme in the unfolding method and clarify its validity for tBLG. Velocity renormalization of Dirac electrons in tBLG is elucidated in the present unfolding scheme.
Modern computing facilities grant access to first-principles density-functional theory study of complex physical and chemical phenomena in materials, that require large supercell to properly model the system. However, supercells are associated to small Brillouin zones in the reciprocal space, leading to folded electronic eigenstates that make the analysis and interpretation extremely challenging. Various techniques have been proposed and developed in order to reconstruct the electronic band structures of super cells, unfolded into the reciprocal space of an ideal primitive cell. Here, we propose an efficient unfolding scheme embedded directly in the Vienna Ab-initio Simulation Package (VASP), that requires modest computational resources and allows for an automatized mapping from the reciprocal space of the supercell to primitive cell Brillouin zone. This algorithm can computes band structures, Fermi surfaces and spectral functions, by using an integrated post-processing tool (bands4vasp). The method is here applied to a selected variety of complex physical situations: the effect of doping on the band dispersion in the BaFe$_{rm 2(1-x)}$Ru$_{rm 2x}$As$_2$ superconductor, the interaction between adsorbates and polaronic states on the TiO$_2$(110) surface, and the band splitting induced by non-collinear spin fluctuations in EuCd$_2$As$_2$.
We propose a novel periodicity-free unfolding method of the electronic energy spectra. Our new method solves a serious problem that calculated electronic band structure strongly depends on the choice of the simulation cell, i.e., primitive-cell or supercell. The present method projects the electronic states onto the free-electron states, giving rise to the {it plane-wave unfolded} spectra. Using the method, the energy spectra can be calculated as a completely independent quantity from the choice of the simulation cell. We have examined the unfolded energy spectra in detail for three models and clarified the validity of our method: One-dimensional interacting two chain model, monolayer graphene, and twisted bilayer graphene. Furthermore, we have discussed that our present method is directly related to the experimental ARPES (Angle-Resolved Photo-Emission Spectroscopy) spectra.
Molecular Docking (MD) is an important step of the drug discovery process which aims at calculating the preferred position and shape of one molecule to a second when they are bound to each other. During such analysis, 3D representations of molecules are manipulated according to their degree of freedoms: rigid roto-translation and fragment rotations along the rotatable bonds. In our work, we focused on one specific phase of the molecular docking procedure i.e. Molecular Unfolding (MU), which is used to remove the initial bias of a molecule by expanding it to an unfolded shape. The objective of the MU problem is to find the configuration that maximizes the molecular area, or equivalently, that maximizes the internal distances between atoms inside the molecule. We propose a quantum annealing approach to MU by formulating it as a High-order Unconstrained Binary Optimization (HUBO) which was possible to solve on the latest D-Wave annealing hardware (2000Q and Advantage). Results and performances obtained with quantum annealers are compared with state of art classical solvers.
We examine the emergence of objectivity via quantum Darwinism through the use of a collision model, i.e. where the dynamics is modeled through sequences of unitary interactions between the system and the individual constituents of the environment, termed ancillas. By exploiting versatility of this framework, we show that one can transition from a Darwinistic to an encoding environment by simply tuning their interaction. Furthermore we establish that in order for a setting to exhibit quantum Darwinism we require a mutual decoherence to occur between the system and environmental ancillas, thus showing that system decoherence alone is not sufficient. Finally, we demonstrate that the observation of quantum Darwinism is sensitive to a non-uniform system-environment interaction.