Saturday, January 21, 2012

Finishing what I started

As of today, I'm happy to report that my last pull request for angular momentum coupling was merged into master (see here). The master branch now has the capability to do arbitrary angular momentum coupling and uncoupling. I ended up writing a summary of the algorithm I used to write this, which I briefly described (or more accurately, brushed over) in the previous blog post, the write up for which is currently hosted on github here. This should be all of the big changes for the angular momentum algebra I can foresee in the near future.

At this point, school is starting back up again and especially since I have joined a research group I won't be doing anything big in the near future. That said, I do have a couple things I've started in on that I will try to finish up if I can get some time. First, I started working on some changes to the quantum printing framework. I have a pull request open for some new tests to the quantum printing framework, so if that can get finished up I'll try to work on getting those changes in. This was an issue that had been brought up before (around the time I started the GSoC project) and even the work I've done so far, I've dug up a couple issues with the printing framework. The current pull for the tests are here and the changes to the printing framework which are to follow are here.

In addition, over winter break, I dug into some related issues with Piecewise, particularly with the treatment of the otherwise parameter. Just today I opened a pull request for collecting feedback on the changes I made here.

Now that the spin stuff is finished, I've been thinking about going back and looking at the stuff I did at the beginning of the GSoC project, particularly some of the stuff with CG coefficients and simplification of these terms. From what I remember, there should be some quick changes to make some stuff run much better, so if I get time, I'll take a look back at that.

Last, while I am quite happy with how the current angular momentum coupling and uncoupling methods treat numerical cases, there's nothing really there for treating symbolic cases and any symbolic arguments cause the methods to return a very general summation. I put some thought into modifying the current algorithm to allow for some forms of symbolic coupling and uncoupling, but I wasn't able to come up with any. If I can sit down and find something that could do symbolic coupling and uncoupling, that would be the icing on the cake of the current algorithm.

With the merging of this pull request, everything that I set out to do for my GSoC project last summer has been completed in some form. There may be some things to refine or work on, but for the most part, I have accomplished everything I set out to do. Unless I make some big changes to the coupling algorithm, like working out something with symbolic cases, or make some other big change to the angular momentum algebra, this will likely be my last post here, at least until something else comes up that I'd like to document.