QMC openGroup

Modern scientific research demands an extensive collection of technical capabilities. The challenge in presenting research results to the community is that the conventional publishing process normally requires researchers to summarize only briefly the steps taken to analyze data, perform simulations, etc. Of course, if every detail were included in every paper, every publication would be so long and technical that the work would rapidly become completely inaccessible to all but the most specialized audience.

But at the end of the day, presenting only research summaries can also hinder scientific research in several ways. First, lacking access to all the technical steps of a project makes it extremely difficult for other researchers to incorporate the latest scientific results 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 the results.

QMC Group aims to achieve an extremely high level of transparency in our work. We have been planning the debut of openGroup for some time. This is our plan to provide unprecedented access to everything happening in our research program. Over the past several months we have put in place the necessary web infrastructure (such as our wiki-based website, and streaming-capable servers) to make QMC openGroup possible. Our plan now is to begin adding subject matter such as:

• Simulation code used for theory projects
• Raw data and analysis software from experiments
• Schematics and machine drawing of our hardware
• Evolving notes on research topics
• Web-cams of our experiments (eventually)

This is a work in progress, but we will strive to add content on a regular basis (bearing in mind that we have some catching up to do)!

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.