public QMCGroup::openGroup( )

Welcome to the QMC Group Open Science Portal.

Conducting research in atomic and optical physics requires an extensive set of technical capabilities. Yet, the conventional publication process is not well-equipped to capture fully how these capabilities are utilized in the process of obtaining results. Typically, only a short summary of an experimental apparatus is published, but at the end of the day, presenting only such summaries hinders scientific progress. First, lacking access to all the technical steps of a project makes it extremely difficult for other researchers to reproduce results and to incorporate the latest methods into their own work. Second, scientific research is by its very nature a process that can be accelerated by allowing the largest possible group of people to analyze and critique a project.

QMC Group aims to achieve an extremely high level of transparency in our work, with unprecedented access to everything happening in our research program:

• All Data and Code used to Generate Figures in our Published Work
• Lab Notebooks
• Simulation Code Developed under our Theory Program
• Schematics and Machine Drawings of our Hardware
• Data Acquisition and Control Software
• Funding and Research Proposals

QMC Group strives to make it as easy as possible for other groups to reproduce all of our published results. The links on our Publications Page will provide access to all of the raw data and analysis code used to generate every table and figure in the papers we write.

History

We put in place the necessary web infrastructure (such as our wiki-based website, and streaming-capable servers) to make QMC openGroup possible during the 2007-2008 academic year. Our plan remains to continue adding subject matter to the website, and we are exploring in 2008-2009 various completely electronic methods for maintaining laboratory notebooks. This effort is a work in progress, but we will strive to add content on a regular basis!

Disclaimer

We ask our visitors to appreciate that in our effort to open our research program to the scientific community, it is somewhat impractical for us to provide completely polished material in all instances. In some cases we wanted to reproduce a whiteboard calculation by TeXing up the relevant content. Typographical or transcription errors in intermediate notes do not necessarily imply that there is a substantive problem with our work. If you catch an error and want to let us know, please feel free to help us improve the material on this site. We will do our best to keep up with all requests.