All posts by Mike Towler

Ten years in the mountains: the Vallico Academy, its lectures, and CASINO v3.2

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God, has it really been more than ten years since I last wrote anything here? When you step away from university life in Cambridge and retreat to a sixteenth-century mountain village in Tuscany, a decade can slip past with disconcerting ease. As far as CASINO was concerned, for quite a while I let things drift, occasionally merging a patch that Neil Drummond or Pablo López Ríos sent across, reading books I never had time to read, doing stuff, and watching the woodland slowly reclaim the agricultural terraces above the village.

Then, earlier this year, several things happened at once. First, in mid August I decided to publish CASINO 3.0, pending since 2012 while I finished the tedious DMC autostop thing. Then I decided to kick myself up the arse, pull together a serious computational laboratory of 64-core Threadripper workstations here in Tuscany, load them with all the software I could get my hands on, and give CASINO the top-to-bottom overhaul it had been owed for a decade. I don’t know why I did that, I just felt a strong urge one day. Must be a mission from God. Anyway, the immediate result of that two-month offensive is CASINO v3.2, shipping today for Halloween with 1345 patches, a completely rewritten 500-page manual, a browser-native version of the code, so many errors fixed you wouldn’t believe, and a large pile of new physics (see the Done and To Do page and the development log for the gory details). Second, and more importantly, this summer the old monastery building in Vallico Sotto began its second life.

Il Collegio and the Vallico Academy

Anyone who came out to the Apuan Alps for our quantum Monte Carlo workshops or the CASINO summer schools between 2005 and 2017 will remember the building: Il Collegio, clinging to the hillside in Vallico Sotto (population roughly 800 in the 1920s, around 25 today). For a dozen years it served as the Towler Institute and the Apuan Alps Centre for Physics. This year, after a long refurbishment incoroprating the house of our dear neighbour Flora Calissi, it reopened quietly as the Vallico Academy.

Modern university departments are marvellous machines for turning grant applications into incremental papers, but they are increasingly hostile places in which to think about anything large, slow or unfashionable. The Academy is an attempt to build the opposite sort of sanctuary, closer in spirit to Marsilio Ficino’s original Academy in the hills above Florence: a small residential place for long questions, serious conversation, independent work and the kind of thought that needs time. Physics remains at the heart of it, particularly electronic structure and the foundations of quantum mechanics, but the remit is deliberately wider. The library is growing around the things we actually argue about over dinner: physics, philosophy, consciousness, history, literature and art. One room houses the Classical Education Library, which began when we looked at the four-year Great Books syllabus of Thomas Aquinas College, covering everything from Plato and Plotinus to Faraday and Einstein, decided the list was too good to leave as a piece of paper, and bought the lot.

In the fullness of time there will be an 18th-century experimental laboratory where you build real physical things and test predictions without spending millions. Most modern physics requires a synchrotron because people ask boring standard-model questions. If you ask clever nonlinear, macroscopic, or foundational questions, you can build a breathtaking laboratory at Vallico for the price of a workstation or two.

The house has one foundational rule, which is painted metaphorically over the door: “Speculation is allowed; pretending speculation is established fact is not.” And because twenty hours a day in front of a Linux terminal is bad for the soul and worse for the spine, there is room for the body as well as the mind, with places to train, recover and occasionally hit things. (A heavy bag in the cellar turns out to be a remarkably effective way of resolving differences of opinion with Referee 2, or with a Fortran compiler that has spent the afternoon lying to you.). I hate to say it, but there is also a beautiful sauna and spa.

Above the village, on 8,300 square metres of south-facing terraces that the chestnut forest was taking back, we are establishing Vallico Farm as the working outdoor half of the same experiment, complete with an incoming herd of Peruvo-Tuscan alpacas and a trail down to the waterfall. From the outset, the Farm is designed as a social farm (agricoltura sociale): a place where my son Jamie, who has learning difficulties and started at the Steiner school in Florence this autumn, and others like him can live and work as full participants in a real enterprise, supported rather than segregated. None of this is a corporate foundation or a bureaucracy; it is simply what we are building in the village we love.

Series I: Five evenings in the church (Summer 2026)

In the summer of 2026 our first small group of test guests arrived for the Academy’s unofficial opening. Because I had not given a lecture since leaving Cambridge ten years ago and wanted to see if I still remembered how, I gave five evening talks in the former church. The subjects were chosen to look completely unrelated on the first night, while circling a single unnamed question that only came into full view in the final talk:

  • I. Richard Francis Burton. Explorer. Linguist. Scandal.
  • II. Plotinus and Western Esotericism. Mystics. Heretics. Engineers.
  • III. De Broglie, Bohm, and the Pilot Wave. Waves. Particles. Exile.
  • IV. Local Brains, Universal Consciousness: Orchestrated Objective Reduction vs. the de Broglie–Bohm Panpsychist Cosmos.
  • V. Narrow Beam and Open Field: The Blindness that Cannot Detect Itself.

The fourth lecture takes a speculative philosophical hypothesis, turns Chalmers’s “hard problem” of consciousness upside down, and then spends its final act ruthlessly auditing the physics objections against itself. The fifth brings the whole arc together through Iain McGilchrist’s account of the divided brain and the two modes of human attention: the narrow, grasping, instrumental beam that takes things apart to manipulate them, and the broad, open, relational field that sees the living whole. (I sent the slides and scripts to McGilchrist in August to thank him for the inspiration, expecting nothing, and received a wonderfully warm reply by return of post). The talks were not filmed, because a camera changes how people talk in a room, but all 210 pages of slides and 142 pages of full verbatim speaker scripts (some 76,600 words) are freely available on the Series I Lectures page. Lecture III is the bridge to what CASINO has been doing this autumn, which the companion post on pilot waves in CASINO takes up in detail. I’m currently preparing a paper “The inverted hard problem: filter theory, agency and the universal wave function” based on the lecture series, which will be my first foray in trying to publish in a philosophy journal (What are they even called? Hmmmm..)

Three foundational courses in the forge

Alongside the new research papers coming out of the Vallico cluster, I am writing three major lecture courses for the Academy:

  • Diffusion Monte Carlo: the walk, the wall, and the residual. A complete mathematical and physical treatment of DMC written for someone who knows quantum mechanics and wants to understand what random walks in imaginary time are actually doing. Now in its fifth draft (193 pages of slides, a 60-page spoken commentary and seven mathematical appendix decks), it builds the stochastic calculus from scratch, proves the exact correspondence between DMC and Edward Nelson’s real-time stochastic mechanics, and analyses the three prices the method pays: equilibration, finite time step (where Wiener–Hopf renewal theory meets the three-dimensional Bessel process at a nodal wall), and the fixed-node kink.
  • Basil Hiley’s algebraic quantum mechanics: the ideal, the bracket, and the bridge. Basil Hiley (1935–2025), David Bohm’s closest collaborator for thirty years and co-author of The Undivided Universe, was a friend and a memorable speaker at our 2010 Vallico conference. Most physicists have never read his forty-year programme deriving the Schrödinger, Pauli and Dirac equations from minimal left ideals of non-commutative phase-space and Clifford algebras, and those who try often bounce off the typographical errors in the original papers. This course (207 pages of slides and two appendices, backed by symbolic verification scripts and a 76-entry erratum register) reconstructs the entire edifice cleanly, repairs the general-β relativistic Dirac–Bohm quantum potential, and links Hiley’s Moyal moment hierarchy directly to weak values and the quantum geometric tensor.
  • The new de Broglie–Bohm course. In 2009 I gave an eight-lecture graduate course on pilot-wave theory at the Cavendish Laboratory, which has lived ever since on this site’s de Broglie–Bohm page. It is now being rewritten from the ground up into a sixteen-lecture series in three movements: the core theory (Lectures 1 to 6), its relativistic, field-theoretic and cosmological edges (Lectures 7 to 12, with Lecture 12 devoted to CASINO, LOUIS, and real-time many-electron trajectories), and the historical and philosophical frontier beyond it (Lectures 13 to 15, preceded by a popular opening lecture, The return of pilot waves).

A note on the door

One practical postscript: while the lectures and papers are open to everyone online, the physical Academy at Vallico Sotto is not yet open to applications. We are still finishing the farm infrastructure and developing the residential fellowship programme, and for now guests are by invitation only. Oh hell, though, you can only ask.. When the alpacas are settled in their paddock and the doors are ready to open wider, you will read about it here.

Pilot waves in CASINO: from toy boxes to real atoms, molecules and crystals

Projects

Everything you were taught at university about the weirdness of quantum mechanics, from cats that are simultaneously dead and alive to reality waiting politely for an observer to look at it before deciding what to do, hangs on a single word. In 1926 Max Born suggested that the squared modulus of the wave function, |Ψ|², gives the probability of finding a particle at a given place when you make a measurement. In 1927, at the fifth Solvay conference in Brussels, Louis de Broglie pointed out that if you change the word finding to being, every paradox evaporates. Both entities exist at all times: a real wave field Ψ evolving smoothly without collapse according to the Schrödinger equation, and real particles at definite positions guided along continuous trajectories by the gradient of the wave’s phase. David Bohm rediscovered the full many-body theory in 1952, John Bell championed it for thirty years, and most physics departments carried on pretending it did not exist.

Once you take the trajectories seriously, however, a remarkable physical question opens up. Because the de Broglie–Bohm velocity field carries the probability density |Ψ|² along with the wave, an ensemble of systems distributed as |Ψ|² today will remain distributed as |Ψ|² forever, reproducing every statistical prediction of textbook quantum mechanics. In pilot-wave theory, therefore, the Born rule is not a fundamental law of nature written on stone tablets; it is a state of statistical equilibrium, quantum equilibrium, strictly analogous to Maxwell’s thermal distribution in a classical gas. As Antony Valentini showed in 1991 with his subquantum H-theorem, an ensemble started out of equilibrium (P ≠ |Ψ|²) is stirred by the complex phase gradient of the wave until, on any coarse-grained scale, it relaxes towards |Ψ|².

From toy boxes to real matter: why CASINO is here

CASINO’s involvement in this story began in 2010 when I wrote LOUIS, a trajectory code designed to test Valentini’s relaxation theorem for a single particle in a two-dimensional box. In our 2012 paper (Proc. R. Soc. A 468, 990), Nick Russell, Antony Valentini and I showed how the nodes of a multi-mode wave function act as microscopic quantum vortices, winding an out-of-equilibrium probability density into ever finer filaments until it matches the Born rule. LOUIS has shipped as a utility inside CASINO since 2013, and in today’s CASINO v3.2 release it gains a new manual and a full ensemble driver.

Yet for thirty-five years, a glaring gap remained in the foundations literature. Every numerical study of quantum relaxation had been performed in a toy model: a particle in a box, a harmonic oscillator, or a free scalar field. Nobody had ever followed an out-of-equilibrium ensemble in a real, correlated many-electron atom, molecule or crystal. The reason was simple: foundations theorists did not have correlated many-electron wave functions, and the quantum Monte Carlo community, who spend their lives building Slater–Jastrow and multideterminant wave functions within fractions of a millihartree of exact eigenstates, never used them to integrate real-time trajectories. At every step of a variational or diffusion Monte Carlo run, CASINO already computes the exact complex vector ∇i ln Ψ for every electron: its real part is the familiar DMC drift vector, and its imaginary part is the de Broglie–Bohm guidance velocity! We had the machinery sitting in the code all along.

In CASINO v3.2, that machinery is now unleashed. Setting RUNTYPE = pilot_eval turns CASINO into a stateless, multi-state wave-function evaluator that computes ln|Ψ|, the phase, the local energy, the local kinetic energy (which, for a real state away from its nodes, is the Bohmian quantum potential Q), and the logarithmic gradients for almost any wave function CASINO knows how to read. The companion driver pilotdrive performs subspace diagonalisation across a set of correlated VMC trial states and integrates the real-time trajectories of an ensemble using an adaptive fifth-order Dormand–Prince stepper, or, when a diffusion constant is switched on, integrates Edward Nelson’s 1966 real-time stochastic mechanics. Evaluating the wave functions scales gently as about N1.6, taking tens of microseconds per step in helium and a few milliseconds in a 64-electron crystal supercell.

What real electrons taught us: from helium to diamond

I’ve just completed the first study of de Broglie–Bohm and Nelson relaxation across a five-rung ladder of real correlated matter: the helium atom (2 electrons in superpositions of up to ten singlet states within 0.6 mHa of exact), the beryllium atom (4 electrons, 12 states), the water molecule (10 electrons, 6 states), the benzene molecule (42 electrons, 4 states), and a periodic diamond crystal (64 electrons in a 2×2×2 supercell, 5 states). Turning QMC trial wave functions into real-time pilot waves immediately uncovered three pieces of physics that no toy box could show:

  1. The dimensional cascade. From beryllium to diamond, the initial drop in the coarse-grained H-function accelerates dramatically as the dimension 3N of the configuration space grows. Within just 20 atomic units of time (about half a femtosecond), H̄ falls to a third of its initial value in beryllium, an eighth in water, and under a fiftieth in benzene and diamond, with the 64-electron diamond crystal reaching the statistical sampling floor of a Born ensemble by the second recorded step (5 a.u.).
  2. Spontaneous Loschmidt echoes on a phase torus. In a few-electron atom like helium, adding more states does not guarantee faster relaxation. Because bound atomic eigenstates are real, whenever the relative phases 2(En − E1)t of the superposed states pass near multiples of 2π on their torus, a condition predictable from the energy spectrum alone before running a single trajectory, the wave function becomes nearly real up to a global phase. At that “near-real instant”, the velocity field becomes odd in time, v(t* + τ) ≈ −v(t* − τ): every electron comes to a halt and retraces its own path backwards through six-dimensional space! In five-state helium, the ensemble relaxes steadily for 556 atomic units down to a tenth of its initial H̄, hits the near-real instant at t* = 555.9 a.u., and dutifully climbs back up its own mirrored decay curve for the next 170 a.u. Under Nelson’s stochastic dynamics, by contrast, the osmotic drift and Brownian noise are not odd under time reversal: the noise obliterates the Loschmidt echo, fills the diffuse Rydberg halo by diffusion, and relaxes water and benzene six to eight times faster than the deterministic flow.
  3. The continuity defect and the Real-Jastrow Theorem. Because QMC trial wave functions are not exact eigenstates, differentiating |Ψ|² along a Bohmian trajectory reveals a small continuity leak whose rate ε(R, t) is driven by the exact local-energy fluctuations EL(n)(R) − En that variational Monte Carlo minimises. Integrating that defect along each trajectory yields an exact pathwise weight eS that restores the Born distribution. Even better, because a common real Jastrow factor eJ has zero phase, it cancels out of Im ∇ ln Ψ for a single state: the Jastrow factor carves a 1-Hartree correlation hole around each electron in the Bohmian quantum potential Q while leaving a single state’s velocity field completely untouched!

The films: imaginary time, real time, and attosecond charge migration

Having exact trajectories and walker histories on disk also allowed us to build a new rendering pipeline linking CASINO and Blender. When watching these animations, one fundamental distinction should be kept in mind.

The films of diffusion Monte Carlo (DMC), among them those of caffeine, C60 and small molecules whose nuclei are quantum particles, are on the Videos and Simulations page, with interactive 3D browser scenes. In those the motion is a computational random walk in imaginary time τ towards the ground state; in real time, the electrons of a real non-degenerate ground state stand completely still where the repulsive quantum force −∇Q balances the electrostatic force −∇V.

The five films below cross over into real time, showing what electrons actually do when guided by Nelson’s stochastic mechanics and by the deterministic de Broglie–Bohm pilot wave. Turn the sound up: every one of them has sound but the film of beryllium.

Full screen: the button among the film’s controls, at its lower right in most browsers, or in Firefox, Chrome and Edge a double-click on the film; on a phone, tap the film, then that button, and turn the phone sideways. Or open the film by itself, alone in the browser’s window.

Attosecond charge migration in chloroacetylene: 15 outer electrons shuttling a hole between a chlorine atom and a carbon triple bond every 1.2 femtoseconds, after one electron is taken suddenly from the orbital that lies mostly on the chlorine of H–C≡C–Cl. The nuclei are held still and the ion kept to the two of its states that make up most of what the removal leaves, whose beat moves the hole: amber where the ion has less electron density than the neutral molecule, blue where it has more. The streaks are the paths of those electrons, each moved by the de Broglie–Bohm guidance law with its spin a fixed label, integrated by CASINO’s pilotdrive, first in one molecule and then in 296 drawn together, whose electrons sample the ion’s density at the start and at every beat, the approximations letting the sample drift from it between beats; a second of film is about 167 attoseconds. Chlorine’s spin-orbit coupling is left out, and in the real molecule the nuclei move and the beat is expected to fade within a few femtoseconds.

Full screen: the button among the film’s controls, at its lower right in most browsers, or in Firefox, Chrome and Edge a double-click on the film; on a phone, tap the film, then that button, and turn the phone sideways. Or open the film by itself, alone in the browser’s window.

Edward Nelson’s stochastic mechanics (1966): in a real stationary state, where a de Broglie–Bohm electron sits still, a Nelson electron undergoes frictionless Brownian diffusion driven by the osmotic velocity Re ∇ ln Ψ—the exact same Markov process as the drift-diffusion step of importance-sampled DMC. Shown here for a single hydrogen 1s electron, an ensemble of 2,000 hydrogen atoms, and the 74 valence electrons of caffeine.

Full screen: the button among the film’s controls, at its lower right in most browsers, or in Firefox, Chrome and Edge a double-click on the film; on a phone, tap the film, then that button, and turn the phone sideways. Or open the film by itself, alone in the browser’s window.

Quantum relaxation in the beryllium atom: four electrons in a superposition of twelve singlet states, guided by CASINO’s correlated pilot wave. On the left, 4,000 atoms started out of equilibrium in the ground-state density; on the right, 2,000 atoms started in the Born distribution; beneath, the coarse-grained H-function falling over 200 atomic units (4.8 femtoseconds) with its characteristic beat pause between 70 and 115 a.u. The film has no sound.

Full screen: the button among the film’s controls, at its lower right in most browsers, or in Firefox, Chrome and Edge a double-click on the film; on a phone, tap the film, then that button, and turn the phone sideways. Or open the film by itself, alone in the browser’s window.

Vortex stirring in 2D (LOUIS): the classic 2012 calculation rendered afresh in high definition. An out-of-equilibrium ensemble of particles in a square box is guided by a 16-mode superposition; the moving nodes act as quantum tornadoes that stretch and fold the probability density into fine filaments until the Born rule is reached.

Full screen: the button among the film’s controls, at its lower right in most browsers, or in Firefox, Chrome and Edge a double-click on the film; on a phone, tap the film, then that button, and turn the phone sideways. Or open the film by itself, alone in the browser’s window.

Vortex lines in 3D (LOUIS): the three-dimensional counterpart in a cubic box under 64 standing waves, where the codimension-two nodes form closed vortex filaments and open lines that sweep through the box, reconnecting and stirring the ensemble into sheets.

Where to find the code and the details

The kinship between imaginary-time DMC walks and real-time pilot-wave and Nelson trajectories is not merely a curiosity. Analysing the stochastic behaviour of walkers near nodal surfaces has already led in CASINO v3.2 to an exact three-dimensional Bessel-process near-node propagator for DMC. You can explore more films and interactive browser visualisations on the Videos and Simulations page, the background lectures on the de Broglie–Bohm page, the technical specifications of pilot_eval and pilotdrive in Chapter 16 (“The wave function outside QMC”) and Chapter 20 of the new CASINO v3.2 manual, and the commit-by-commit history in the development log.

Summer school report: Quantum Monte Carlo and the CASINO program IX

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The ninth international summer school in the “Quantum Monte Carlo and the CASINO program” series took place from Sunday 3rd August to Sunday 10th August 2014 and involved 32 people (including 22 students) from 14 countries.

The purpose of the school was to provide the students with a thorough working knowledge of the quantum Monte Carlo electronic structure method as currently used in quantum chemistry and condensed matter physics and to show them how to use the Cambridge CASINO QMC program for serious scientific research. The participants spent around 4-5 hours each morning listening to lectures from Mike Towler and Neil Drummond on the quantum Monte Carlo method. This was followed by practical examples classes with the CASINO software, and a programme of healthy recreational activities such as mountain walking and cave exploration.

Away from their scientific activities, the participants mounted successful expeditions to Monte Procinto, Pania della Croce, the rock arch of Monte Forato, the cave of Cascaltendine, Monte Palodina, the Orrido di Botri canyon, and the flat top of Monte Penna, the beautiful city of Lucca, and the open-air swimming pool at Barga. These trips were followed by nice dinners at Alto Matanna, Da Sandra, Eremo di Calomini, Al Laghetto and the old restaurant at Vallico Sotto, specially opened yet again for the “Vallico Sotto against the World” football match. Tragically, our team suffered yet another heavy defeat to the thrusting young lads of Vallico Sotto, but this time they did it with style, with some of the goals by Libya’s very own Sabri Elatresh being some of the greatest in the history of the Rest of the World side.

To check which students have been paying most attention during the lectures and practical classes, we traditionally hold a tough examination on the final day. The highest mark and the award of the prestigious title of “TTI QMC Summer School Champion 2014”, went to Peter Townsend of Cambridge University — with an honourable mention for Katharina Doblhoff-Dier, who nearly beat him — and for this he was awarded the prize of a bottle of Vietnamese snake wine, containing a cobra eating a smaller snake, of the type apparently used by Vietnamese gentlemen to increase their virility [NB: TTI does not condone the murder of animals for this purpose, but we happened to have a bottle of it, and all the TTI staff are quite virile enough, thank you very much]. Townsend’s triumph was celebrated with fireworks and, continuing a long tradition of oratorical brilliance from former champions stretching back many years, we heard a quality speech from the victor which could have been given by Winston Churchill. After thirty-four whiskies, fourteen glasses of porter, too many super strength cigars, and a Nazi bombing raid.

Documents
– Poster
– Original announcement
– Summer school programme

Photos
– Samuel Chang
– Caterina de Franco
– Jan Jenke
– Mike Towler

Instructors
Mike Towler and Neil Drummond assisted by Sam Azadi

Students
Ali Bagci, Braulio Brito, Eike Caldeweyher, Kuang-Yu Samuel Chang, Shibing Chu, Caterina De Franco, Katharina Doblhoff-Dier, Sabri Elatresh, Fatih Ersan, Jan Florian, Wei Guo, Jiří Hostaš, Jan Jenke, Yelda Kadioglu, Saudi Woman, Thomas Mellan, Christoph Reimann, Giovanni Rillo, Peter Townsend, Fan Wang, Thomas Whitehead, Dmitry Zvezhinsky

Lectures presented : slides (password required)

Mike Towler (mdt26 at cantab.net)
1. “Quantum Monte Carlo : a practical solution to the correlation problem in electronic structure calculations” [PDF]
2. “The CASINO program : a basic introduction to functionality and input/output” [PDF]
3. “The CASINO program: distribution, setup, and compilation” [PDF]
4. “Probability and statistics in quantum Monte Carlo: the fascinating details” [PDF]
5. “Useful calculations for big, complicated systems: quantum Monte Carlo at the research frontier” [PDF]
6. “Three QMC scaling problems: many atoms, many protons, many processors” [PDF]
7. “Interfaces between CASINO and external programs” [PDF]
8. “Pseudopotentials for quantum Monte Carlo: a necessary evil” [PDF]
9. “Forces and dynamics. Expectation values other than the energy” [PDF]

Neil Drummond (n.drummond at lancaster.ac.uk)
10. “Optimization of many-electron wave functions” [PDF]
11. “Theory and practice of Diffusion quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]
12. “Wave functions beyond Slater-Jastrow” [PDF]
13. “Quantum Monte Carlo studies of condensed matter: Ewald interactions and finite size effects” [PDF]
14. “Quantum Monte Carlo study of the two-dimensional homogeneous electron gas” [PDF]

Practical worksheets and input files
– “QMC practical classes” [gzipped tar file]

QMC Exam
– “Exam” [PDF]
– “Answers” [PDF]

Comments
  • “Thank you so much for the two amazing weeks in Vallico. I will never forget
    those moments.”
  • “The week of the summer school went so fast. I think I got both knowledge and fun from this school. Thank you very much for your work!”
  • No words can express how much I am grateful for what you did. Thanks a lot for this extraordinary school.. I hope this school go on for as many years as possible.
  • “Thank you once more for wonderful summer school!”
  • “Thank you for all you did in Vallico Sotto..”
  • “Thank you very much for organizing such an interesting summer school. I do benefit a lot from this summer school.”
  • “Thank you for organising this wonderful week in Vallico Sotto and preparing all the lectures. The last lecture, especially ‘DMC vs. stochastic pilot-wave theories’ and ‘De Broglie-Bohm theory’ was really interesting and I hope to have time to learn more about this topic.”
  • “Thanks, I had a brilliant time, and learnt a little bit of QMC too. Unfortunately not enough time for me to use QMC during this PhD for my VO2 work, but if I start a post doc within the next few months, it would be seriously useful for strongly correlated materials I’m interested in and attempt to study using DFT presently. Wagner’s paper was one of the reasons I was so keen to attend, so I’m glad you were impressed too.”
  • “Many thanks to you (with Neil and Sam) for your work. I noted how it was hard for you to finish the school by yourself. I personally need some time to digest all information and hope that we can still discuss remaining questions by means of forum or email. (I promise that I will not annoy too much with them.)”
  • I thank to you very much for everything Mike. It is my first international summer school so i hesitated to speak with you because of my bad english in speaking ( im going to develop it). This summer school is very important and special for me. I was able to learn how i can use casino and also convert dft inputs to casino in there. i will use casino in my electronic and geometric structure calculations. I had to leave very early (6.00 am) from Vallico Sotto because of the plane. So I did not have the opportunity to say goodbye (also thank) to you. Nice to meet you and others very much.
  • “I have been back to China yesterday. Very much Thanks for your time and effort for the TTI conference and summer school. You are a good guy.^_^ When I get a faculty position of China’s university in the near future, I would love to make an invitation for you to have a visit of China If you will and have some time. It’s really an amazing journey to the Vallico Sotto. I enjoy the climbing, the hiking, the Italian foods and discussing with lot of clever guys. I love the photo about you with black beard (but I don’t think the black beard is the reason ^_^) and your daughter in your homepage.”

Peter Townsend – Summer School Champion 2014

Sabri Elatresh – best footballer ever..

Sergeant Azadi

The Changs (best photographer..)

Monte Matanna – summit

Monte Procinto and Pania della Croce

Monte Nona

Monte Nona II

Monte Nona III

Monte Nona IV


Monte Nona V

Local wildlife

Sergeant Azadi makes a low hummming, whistling noise

The hunt for the secret tunnel

The hunt for the secret tunnel II

Conference report: Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps IX

Blog


It was Daniela the barmaid who told me that the old people — though surely they weren’t so old that they would actually remember — were saying that it was the worst summer weather in Tuscany since 1915. Well, round here you never know — they might be — and despite the rain, almost a hundred years later, forty-six people have gathered in Vallico Sotto to attend the ninth “Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps” international workshop. From the 26th of July to the 2nd of August 2014 our resident physicists and chemists spent each morning listening to talks on quantum Monte Carlo and related computational electronic structure methods, followed by afternoons that were often full of mountain walking, caving, canyoning and other activities but — for pretty much the first time ever in history of events at TTI — were equally often cancelled because of the appalling weather.

A great deal of interesting science was presented and discussed at the meeting, and much of this is summarized in the scientific report further down this page. I think it’s now clear to most people that the quantum Monte Carlo method is continuing to grow in utility and importance, and for those with a big enough computer it self-evidently ought to be the method of choice for highly accurate benchmark quantum-mechanical calculations of molecules and materials — certainly those with more than a few atoms.

As described on the CASINOQMC blog some weeks ago, the monastery had undergone an extensive revamp for its 10th anniversary with a freshly painted exterior, sealed internal walls that don’t rain plaster on delicate electronics, and a vastly improved university-grade broadband wireless network extended to the whole site and nearby buildings with a dedicated Synology central file server (at one stage the Wifi was running over 150 connected devices). We also now have an outdoor ping-pong table, and our musical equipment was upgraded to the extent that the place can now be considered a live music venue. This was ably demonstrated by singer Ed Norris — hired for the opening night 10th Anniversary party — who moved many of the local people to tears with his renditions of ‘old Frank Sinatra/Tony Bennett-style songs’ [I’ve realized that I don’t know how to properly refer to this style of ‘Jazzy Pop Standard Lounge Swing Crooning’ which is often insultingly misfiled as ‘Easy Listening’ in record shops, but I think you know what I mean. It’s actually very cool, even if young people don’t generally like it or more likely have never heard of it.].

Anyway, away from their scientific activities, the participants mounted successful expeditions to Monte Procinto, Pania della Croce, the rock arch of Monte Forato, the cave of Cascaltendine, Monte Palodina and the flat top of Monte Penna, the beautiful city of Lucca, and the open-air swimming pool at Barga. These trips were followed by nice dinners at Alto Matanna, Da Sandra, Eremo di Calomini, Al Laghetto and the old restaurant at Vallico Sotto, specially opened yet again for the “Vallico Sotto against the World” football match. Tragically, the Rest of the World team shuddered under the second heaviest beating in history to the thrusting young lads of Vallico Sotto, despite not playing all that badly. Possibly they were suffocated by having a surfeit of players, in much the same way as King Henry 1st of England (though that was with lampreys, obviously).

Regular attendees may have heard me going on for years about the mysterious secret tunnel, closed as recently as the 1930s, which ran from somehere below the Doctor’s House in Vallico Sotto all the way up to the site of the former Fortress several hundred metres away at the top of the hill, and whose precise location has been lost to collective memory. After all the talk it was clear that it was time to find it or just shut up. Did we succeed..? Not during the conference, though Dario Bressanini did obtain a clue by posing as a tourist and talking to old ladies. And later? All will be revealed (possibly) in the next instalment of the ‘News from the Towler Institute‘ blog over at the Barga News site.

Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps may return one day, but financial issues and the increasingly stupid organizational effort required means that summer 2015 will mark our first proper year off. Anyone wishing to use the place for their own meetings in which MDT doesn’t have to work so hard should contact him, preferably offering gifts (see p. 12 paragraph 5 of the current CASINO manual).

Documents
– Poster
– Original announcement
– Conference programme

List of participants
Dario Alfè, Sam Azadi, Giovanni Bachelet, Dario Bressanini, Shibing Chu, Ron Cohen, Gareth Conduit, Csaba Daday, Caterina De Franco, Andrea Droghetti, Neil Drummond, Edgar Engel, Matthew Foulkes, Leonardo Guidoni, Nic Harrison, Kenta Hongo, Blazej Jaworowski, Martin Korth, Jonathan Lloyd-Williams, Pierre-Francois Loos, Pablo López Ríos, Ryo Maezono, Fionn Malone, Mariapia Marchi, Bartomeu Monserrat-Sanchez, Elaheh Mostaani, Richard Needs, Carlo Pierleoni, Tom Poole, James Shepherd, Sandro Sorella, James Spencer, Alex Thom, Mike Towler, John Trail, Cyrus Umrigar, Tack Uyeda, Will Vigor, Ching-Ming Wei [CANCELLED: Stefano Baroni, Vincenzo Barone, Roberto Dovesi]


Photographs
– Ron Cohen
– Gareth Conduit
– Csaba Daday
– Caterina de Franco
– Pierre-Francois Loos
– Mariapia Marchi
– Mike Towler
– Will Vigor

Music videos
– Mike Towler: Ed the Singer
– Pierre-Francois Loos: Italians are proud: riot at Laghetto
– Mike Towler: Bressanini and Bachelet: Folk Band
– Mike Towler: The dwindling audience of Jerry Lee Lewis


Talks presented

  • Dario Alfè (d.alfe at ucl.ac.uk)
    “Water clusters, ice, and bulk liquid: improving ab initio structure and energetics” [PDF]
  • Ron Cohen (ronald.cohen at ucl.ac.uk)
    “Quantum Monte Carlo simulations on silicate perovskite and other high pressure phases” [PDF]
  • Gareth Conduit (gjc29 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Pseudizing the Hamiltonian” [PDF]
  • Csaba Daday (dadaycs at gmail.com)
    “Wave function embedding methods and excited states: a guide to the perplexed” [PDF]
  • Andrea Droghetti (drogheta at tcd.ie)
    “Spin-crossover molecules: puzzling systems for electronic structure methods” [PDF]
  • Neil Drummond (n.drummond at lancaster.ac.uk)
    “Electronic and vibrational properties of monolayer hexagonal indium chalcogenides” [PDF]
  • Edgar Engel (eae32 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Anharmonic nuclear motion and the relative stability of hexagonal and cubic ice” [PDF]
  • Leonardo Guidoni (l.guidoni at gmail.com)
    “Geometries and properties of (bio)molecules by quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]

  • Nic Harrison (nicholas.harrison at imperial.ac.uk)
    “Describing strong interactions – some outstanding problems” [PDF]
  • Kenta Hongo (kenta_hongo at mac.com)
    “QMC applications to noncovalent interactions in cyclohexasilane dimers” [PDF]
  • Martin Korth (martin.korth at uni-ulm.de)
    “On the hunt for molecular organic battery materials” [PDF]
  • Jonathan Lloyd-Williams (jhl50 at cam.ac.uk)
    “DFT and QMC calculations of solid molecular hydrogen” [PDF]
  • Pierre-Francois Loos (loos at rsc.anu.edu.au)
    “Chemistry in a 1D world” [PDF]
  • Pablo López Ríos (pl275 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Multideterminant compression algorithm for quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]
  • Ryo Maezono (rmaezono at mac.com)
    “Embedded atom into jellium sphere” [PDF]
  • Fionn Malone (f.malone13 at imperial.ac.uk)
    “Parallel strategies for FCIQMC” [PDF]
  • Mariapia Marchi (marchi at esteco.com)
    “Using modeFRONTIER to automate DFT and QMC calculations: application to liquid hydrogen” [PDF]
  • Bartomeu Monserrat Sanchez (bm418 at cam.ac.uk)
    “An overview of vibrations in solids” [PDF]
  • Elaheh Mostaani (emostaani at gmail.com)
    “Binding energy of bilayer graphene (updated) and electronic properties of oligoynes” [PDF]
  • Richard Needs (rn11 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Xenon oxides under pressure” [PDF]
  • Carlo Pierleoni (carlo.pierleoni at aquila.infn.it)
    “Liquid-liquid phase transition in high pressure hydrogen: new predictions from CEIMC and comparison with DFT” [PDF]
  • Tom Poole (thomas.poole10 at imperial.ac.uk)
    “Algorithmic differentiation of diffusion Monte Carlo” [PDF] [NOT YET AVAILABLE]
  • Sandro Sorella (sorella at sissa.it)
    “Ab initio simulation of liquid water by quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]
  • James Spencer (j.spencer at imperial.ac.uk)
    “An overview of the HANDE QMC project” [PDF]
  • Alex Thom (ajwt3 at cam.ac.uk)
    “FCIQMC and finite electron gases” [PDF]
  • Mike Towler (mdt26 at cam.ac.uk)
    “High-throughput QMC” [PDF]
    (Missing 5 slides near the end due to accidental file deletion – to be reconstructed.)
  • John Trail (jrt32 at cam.ac.uk)
    “Pseudopotentials for correlated electron systems” [PDF]
  • Cyrus Umrigar (cyrusumrigar at gmail.com)
    “Semistochastic quantum Monte Carlo: a hybrid of exact diagonalization and quantum Monte Carlo methods” [PDF]
  • Tack Uyeda (tueeeda at jaist.ac.jp)
    “Estimation of exchange interaction of SrMnO3 by QMC” [PDF] [NOT AVAILABLE]
  • William Vigor (w.vigor11 at imperial.ac.uk)
    “Unloading the dice: minimising biases in full configuration interaction quantum Monte Carlo” [PDF]
  • Ching-Ming Wei (cmw at phys.sinica.edu.tw)
    “Binding energy of 2D materials using QMC” [PDF]


Scientific report
Participants at the conference gave presentations on a very wide range of topics which I shall attempt to summarize below. I have divided them very roughly into two sections: (1) theoretical, algorithmic, and computational developments (which of course may involve interesting applications), and (2) applications. Some of the talks could conceivably fit in either of those categories; in such cases I have arbitrarily chosen one.

Theory
John Trail gave a very interesting report on his continuing efforts with Richard Needs to develop ‘correlated electron pseudopotentials’ more appropriate for use in explicitly many-body methods such as QMC than the one-electron Dirac-Fock/Hartree-Fock/DFT pseudopotentials that have traditionally been used. He showed that many of the difficulties associated with doing this can be alleviated by generating the pseudopotentials in very ionized atomic states, which are then very transferable to neutral states. Explicitly-correlated QMC results using these pseudopotentials were shown to be significantly more accurate than with Hartree-Fock pseudopotentials for a wide range of molecules and also for more difficult cases such as strongly-correlated and complex transition metal systems.

Multi-determinant expansions are a tool often used in quantum chemistry to construct very accurate wave functions. These can be used directly as trial wave function input to a QMC program but lengthy expansions of this nature can be very slow to evaluate. Pablo López Ríos presented a compression method for significantly reducing the computational cost of such expansions, whilst maintaining the desirable properties of leaving the existing evaluation algorithm unchanged and the original expansion coefficients optimizable. His implementation in the CASINO program showed compression ratios of between 2 and 25 in tests, and these factors translated more or less directly into an overall speedup of the calculation.

Csaba Daday presented work done in collaboration with the group of Claudia Filippi on using an embedding method to combine different levels of theory to describe ground and excited states of biomolecules. In particular, he showed one way of describing the ‘important’ parts of molecules with high-level wave function theory (perturbation theory, coupled cluster, or even DMC) while treating the rest of the system at the DFT level. Unfortunately, while this scheme seems to work well for small solvated molecules, the excitation energies obtained for green fluorescent protein were severely blue-shifted compared to experimental values. His conclusion was that classical embedding (point charges and induced dipoles) is the way to go until better functionals become available for DFT embedding. Clearly significant development work remains to be done.

In his presentation Bartomeu Monserrat-Sanchez showed how to include the effects of atomic vibrations in the calculation of total energies, electronic band gaps, and NMR parameters in first principles calculations. He demonstrated, for example, that static DMC and GW band gaps of diamond are in error by about 0.5 eV due to the neglect of electron-phonon coupling.

Prof. Sorella outlined his recently developed method for performing ab initio molecular dynamics simulations with quantum Monte Carlo. In this technique, ionic forces are computed using highly accurate variational wave functions containing several parameters that are fully optimized on the fly. He showed recent results obtained for hydrogen at high pressure and for liquid water at ambient conditions. Though preliminary the results were clearly very interesting and promising for future applications.

Pierre-Francois Loos of the National University of Australia gave an unusual but very interesting presentation showing that finite-size uniform electron gases can be used to create a generalised version of the local-density approximation. He observed that this new functional can be applied to one-dimensional inhomogeneous systems and that it yields accurate estimates of the correlation energy. He also discussed atoms and molecules in one dimension and demonstrated that, in distinct contrast to our world, one-dimensional atoms are bound by one-electron bonds.

Gareth Conduit’s talk was entitled “Pseudizing the Hamiltonian“. He began by describing the contact interaction often used in modelling ultracold atomic gases, and how it leads to pathological behavior driven by the divergence of the many-body wave function when two particles coalesce. He then proposed a family of smooth pseudopotentials which reproduce the scattering phase shifts of the contact interaction, resulting in significant improvements in efficiency when used in numerical calculations. Finally, he showed how to extend this formalism to generate a pseudopotential for the Coulomb electron-electron interaction in such a way that calculations can be accelerated by an order of magnitude.

Mike Towler’s presentation focussed on ‘high-throughput QMC’ – motivated by the remark made by Tim Mueller at last year’s meeting: “By 2016-ish, we should be able to calculate QMC energies for every known inorganic material on a single supercomputer in about a week (roughly).” Towler showed how it was possible for QMC calculations to ‘monitor themselves’ so that (a) they know when they have equilibrated and it is possible to begin accumulating statistics, (b) they know when they have achieved a desired target for the statistical error bar – which may be set in input – and then automatically stop, and (c) they know when a desired target error bar is ‘unreasonable’ and cannot be attained with a reasonable amount of computation. This can largely be done in a statistically valid way using a ‘distribution-free’ technique which does not rely on the validity of the central limit theorem. It is to be hoped that techniques such as these can help to greatly improve the rate at which calculations of large datasets can be done.

Full configuration interaction QMC (FCIQMC) and related methods such as semi-stochastic QMC have received a substantial amount of attention in recent years, and we were treated to six separate talks on this topic. These techniques arguably have a non-traditional focus compared to regular QMC calculations since they attempt to obtain the full configuration interaction result, i.e., the exact result for a finite basis set, with reduced but still non-polynomial scaling. The utility of such results can typically be seen in the benchmarking of other finite basis methods for small molecules and dimers, but there have also been successes in applying FCIQMC directly to solids such as nickel oxide chains. One can argue that FCIQMC has, in some sense, created a bridge between the usual QMC community and the quantum chemistry community and demonstrated the benefits of a stochastic approach to users of wave function-based methods. Amongst other developments, this has resulted in a stochastic version of coupled cluster theory developed by Alex Thom and collaborators.

Such developments are of course greatly assisted by the availability of high-quality standard software and a particularly promising new open-source code is the ‘highly-accurate N-determinant’ project : HANDE. We heard five talks given by the developmental team of HANDE, which is apparently nearing its public release. Will Vigor of Imperial College, London and James Shepherd of Rice University, focussed on attempts to understand the algorithmic detail of FCIQMC. They reported on errors related to the stochastic algorithm and systematic issues arising from the sign problem. Fionn Malone, also of Imperial College showed how FCIQMC can be parallelized more efficiently using non-blocking asynchronous communication (apparently motivated by Towler’s similar developments in CASINO from several years earlier). Alex Thom of Cambridge University discussed applications of FCIQMC and its coupled cluster equivalent to finite electron gas systems. James Spencer from Imperial gave the final talk as the lead developer in HANDE, and summed up how this work and many others besides had been made possible by access to this new piece of software.

A different but related technique known as semi-stochastic QMC was reported by Prof. Cyrus Umrigar of Cornell University. He presented developments that potentially offer routine efficiency gains of orders of magnitude over FCIQMC, while apparently not compromising on the quality of the resulting full CI energies.

It seems clear that this community has much to do to make FCIQMC etc. routinely useful such that a quantum chemist might consider using it instead of their traditional techniques (it’s bad enough trying to get them to use a non-Gaussian basis set, after all). The exponential scaling with system size remains a serious issue (the main advantage of DMC, for example, is the favourable N3 scaling combined with the high accuracy; of course many techniques exist which can do just high accuracy). Clearly much can be gained from observing similar problems that have been solved in more traditional QMC techniques, and this was reflected in the many and varied questions put to the speakers and the lively discussions that followed both in the session and outside of them.

Applications
Jonathan Lloyd-Williams presented the results of a combined DFT and DMC study of the phase diagram of solid hydrogen at pressures from 100 to 400 GPa. He and his collaborators have performed highly accurate DMC calculations of the static lattice energies of several candidate structures for the various experimentally observed phases of solid molecular hydrogen. By combining the DMC energies with anharmonic vibrational free energies — calculated using the method described in the talk by Monserrat-Sanchez — they found a phase transition between two of the candidate structures at pressures and temperatures in good agreement with those experimentally observed for the phase III/IV transition in solid hydrogen.

Prof. Alfè began by demonstrating the serious deficiencies in the DFT description of water. By decomposing the energy of water systems into a sum of one-body, two-body and many-body terms, and by providing energy benchmarks with CCSD(T) and QMC, he showed that different functionals have different errors in these terms. For example, BLYP has serious two-body errors but relatively small many-body errors. PBE has fairly small two-body errors but larger many-body errors. Alfè then showed that BLYP two-body errors can be effectively eliminated using GAP technology, and the resulting BLYP+GAP potential energy functional provides a good radial distribution function for water at ambient conditions.

Prof. Guidoni gave a very colourful and wide-ranging talk entitled ‘Geometries and properties of biomolecules by quantum Monte Carlo‘, showing calculations of various molecules up to and including models for large biological chromophores. He demonstrated – amongst other things – accurate QMC energies for ground and excited states, geometries, polarizabilities, and harmonic and ananharmonic frequencies. He also showed that geometry optimizations involving more than 100 atoms are now feasible, and that the so-called JAGP wave function (‘Jastrow antisymmetrized geminal power’) – a highly-accurate variational wave function based on Pauling’s ‘resonating valence bonds’ idea – is sufficiently flexible to do useful science at the VMC level rather than the more expensive DMC.

Prof. Cohen showed some applications of DFT, QMC and DFT-DMFT to silicate perovskite, cubic boron nitride, iron monoxide, and a number of other materials at high pressures.

Elaheh Mostaani from the University of Lancaster gave a talk about DMC results for the binding energy of bilayer graphene, demonstrating once more how you can get any answer you like with density functional theory when dealing with van der Waals or other weak interactions – with the sad exception of the correct one [Mike ducks to avoid missiles..]. She also showed preliminary results for a DMC study of the ground- and excited-state electronic properties of oligoynes (end-capped linear carbon chains with alternating single and triple bonds).

Edgar Engel presented DFT PBE calculations of the anharmonic quantum vibrational energies for hexagonal and cubic ice, showing that the thermodynamic stability of hexagonal ice with respect to cubic ice has its origin in the smaller anharmonicity of the nuclear vibrations. Using the displacement patterns of the corresponding high-energy hydrogen vibrational modes, this can be traced back to structural differences between the hexagonal and cubic forms, or more specifically, to the fact that hexagonal ice contains both boat- and chair-form hexamers of H2O molecules whilst cubic ice contains only chair-form hexamers.

As has become traditional, Prof. Needs gave a talk about ab initio random structure searching within DFT, this time with the aim of identifying stable stoichiometries and structures of xenon oxides under pressure.

Kenta Hongo from Japan spoke about noncovalent interactions in cyclohexasilane dimers (which are potentially important in ‘liquid silicon inks’ used as a source material for Si thin films). He compared and constrasted results for calculations done with various different DFT functionals along with MP2, CCSD(T), and DMC methods. The latter two, as they should, showed good agreement. He also showed preliminary results for a DMC study of metallic hydrogen at high pressure.

Martin Korth presented research on molecular organic battery materials with a focus on liquid electrolyte solvents. He used a variety of computational methods from wave function theory to strongly empirical quantitative structure-property relationships with the aim of screening for advantageous compounds. He was able to demonstrate that such an integrated approach is already helping experimentalists to design better electrochemical energy storage devices, and he also gave some insights into the complexity of an accurate computational treatment of electrochemical processes at the atomic scale.


Neil Drummond gave a talk in which he described density functional theory calculations of the electronic band structures, cohesive energies, phonon dispersions and optical absorption spectra of a new class of two-dimensional crystals: In2X2, where X is S, Se or Te. Two crystalline phases (α and β) of monolayers of hexagonal In2X2 were identified, and it was shown that they are characterized by different sets of Raman-active phonon modes. Drummond’s calculations showed that these materials are indirect-band-gap semiconductors with a sombrero-shaped dispersion of holes near the valence-band edge. The latter feature results in a Lifshitz transition (a change in the Fermi-surface topology of hole-doped In2X2) at experimentally accessible hole concentrations. Quantum Monte Carlo calculations are clearly required to describe the electronic structure of these materials with quantitative accuracy.

Prof. Nic Harrison gave an interesting talk on a number of different problems. First of all he investigated whether it was possible to perform accurate compuations of the potential energy surface for the scattering of He atoms off an MgO (100) surface. He showed that it was possible to get close to the exact curve but only with considerable effort (involving doing MP2 calculations of the periodic system with the CRYSCOR code, with coupled-cluster corrections computed using a finite molecule). He also presented a very nice discussion comparing and contrasting the effects of breaking the symmetry in a linear polyacetylene chain using both dimerization (Peierls distortion) and spin-polarization.

Mariapia Marchi showed how the workflow of computations involving both DFT and QMC can be optimized using the commercial software modeFRONTIER developed at the ESTECO S.p.A. company located in Trieste. The modeFRONTIER (mF) code is described as ‘an integration platform for multi-objective and multi-disciplinary optimisation, with an unlimited range of applications, though mainly used in engineering design optimisation‘. In her talk, Marchi focussed on a system of sixteen hydrogen atoms in the molecular liquid phase. DFT runs were used to fill in the Slater-determinant part of the wave function, while one-, two- and three-body terms in the Jastrow factor were optimised with VMC. This was followed by a molecular dynamics step using a second-order Langevin dynamics to sample the ionic configurations within the Born-Oppenheimer approximation. For each new atomic position, the determinant part was filled with new orbitals and the Jastrow factor re-optimised. DFT and VMC energies can be monitored on the fly through mF’s graphical user interface during the run. Although results were shown only for a simple test system, it is clear that this sort of thing can be very useful, for example, in investigating the properties and phase diagram of larger systems in order to avoid finite-size effects.

Andrea Droghetti reported extensive calculations assessing the performances of DMC for ‘spin crossover’ molecules containing Fe(II) ions. Looking at the spin crossover transition he showed that, independently of the choice of the trial wave function, DMC gave an energy difference between the high spin (spin=2) and low spin (spin=0) states which was almost an order of magnitude larger than that computed with state-of-art CASPT. As he pointed out, the quantum chemists normally tell us to trust CASPT2 as a reference so this is a little puzzling, to say the least. Of course we expect DMC to be even better, since with CASPT2 the short-range correlations are treated only perturbatively in contrast to the essentially exact QMC treatment. Andrea says ‘this calls for new studies aimed at unrevealing the shortcomings of both DMC and CASPT for transition metal complexes, which confirm themselves as very challenging systems even for the most advanced electronic structure methods available’.

Prof. Ching-Ming Wei from Taiwan presented various materials simulation applications of QMC including CO adsorption on late transition metal (111) surfaces and the binding energies of 2D layers such as graphene, BN films, and silicene. Though limited computer resources meant that there some issues with DMC error bar convergence he showed a large number of interesting results in systems where DFT is known to fail.

Carlo Pierleoni gave a presentation in which he outlined the established Coupled Electron Ion Monte Carlo (CEIMC) method, and showed an application to the liquid-liquid phase transition in high pressure hydrogen. The region of the phase diagram where molecular hydrogen — stable at low pressure and temperature — transforms into a mono-atomic or plasma state with increasing pressure and/or temperature is both interesting and challenging, in particular since molecular dissociation under pressure is also accompanied by a metal-insulator transition. Traditional QMC methods are largely used to study ground states and miss the important temperature dependence, and the usual Path Integral MC method for fermions is limited to the temperature range above 10-15K. CEIMC is a QMC method, based on the Born-Oppenheimer approximation, in which nuclear degrees of freedom, either classical or quantum, are sampled by standard MC methods, while the electronic energy is obtained by highly accurate ground state QMC method for the electrons. The use of Born-Oppenheimer means CEIMC is capable of investigating the temperature range below which electronic thermal excitation can be safely neglected in the system, and allows one to apply QMC methods to high pressure hydrogen in the most interesting region of the phase diagram where molecular dissociation and metalization under pressure occur. Prof. Pierleoni showed the results of calculations of the molecular dissociation under pressure both with CEIMC and Born-Oppenheimer MD employing several XC functionals, both for classical and quantum nuclei. All the theories (except PBE with quantum nuclei) led to the same qualitative picture of the existence of a weakly first-order liquid-liquid phase transition below some temperature. The precise location of the transition line and of the critical point strongly depended on the theory with the CEIMC line lying in between the GGA-PBE line (at lower pressure) and the vdW-DF2 line (at higher pressure). Note that the pressure difference with different DFT functionals was up to several hundred GPa. The quantitative prediction for the location of the transition line depended crucially on the relative accuracy with which a specific theory can treat both molecular and atomic (or plasma) states, and both insulating and metallic states. He showed that their trial wave function is very accurate even across this crossover and therefore the CEIMC line is expected to to be very accurate. An experimental validation of these theoretical predictions would clearly be immensely valuable.

Tack Uyeda and Tom Poole also gave talks which I will summarize when I manage to find a copy of their slides.

In summary, “Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps IX” was a fascinating meeting which demonstrated many interesting theoretical advances and a very considerable range of applications that QMC is being used to study. However, I thought it was a pity that most of the people whose work I selected to highlight as particularly ground-breaking for a recent review talk entitled “QMC at the research frontier: useful calculations for big complicated systems” were unable to attend this year. I’m thinking of regular visitors like Lucas Wagner, Elif Ertekin, Richard Hennig, Tim Mueller, Luke Shulenburger, Jeff Grossman.. at least two of whom couldn’t come because they’re setting up home together and were installing solar panels on their new roof.

I’m sure you’ll all join me in wishing Lucas and Richard every future happiness.

Oh, wait..

MDT


Comments

  • “I just wanted to say thanks a lot for again organizing the coolest conference of the universe (only small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri could disagree)!” [Sure, but why would they disagree..?? MDT]
  • “Thanks again for working so hard to have a wonderful workshop in Vallico Sotto. There is simply nothing else like it!”
  • “Thank you so much for the two amazing weeks in Vallico. I will never forget those moments.”
  • “It was so great coming to the workshop and getting to know you and your family a little. You are doing great stuff! Maybe in the future I can come longer and help out some.”
  • “It was lovely to see you, Sam, Saska & Jamie, your home and to have a chance to catch up. Thank you for inviting me and for being such gracious hosts.”
  • “Thanks for a good TTI, even the rain was pleasantly tuscanic… Please thank Sam and the kids for having us all, and hope the summer school went well.”
  • “We left in a rush on Friday and I did not have time to thank you again for your hard work in putting together such an excellent event. I enjoyed myself as much as every other year (despite the weather!), and found it one of the most useful conferences I attend every year. Enjoy the summer school!”
  • “Thanks again for a great conference and I hope the summer school goes well, too!”
  • “Thank you again for organising everything. This was a great meeting!”
  • “Thank you very much for your efforts. I really enjoyed the
    conference!”
  • “Thank you very much for your great workshop.”
  • “Thanks for organizing the conference and accommodating my special
    arrangements. As ever, it was very good fun and I was sad to leave
    early.”
  • “Thank you again for the invitation, the hospitality and all the conference organisation. I had a great time there.”
  • “Thanks again for organizing the very nice conference.”

 

 

Preparations for QMC in the Apuan Alps IX

Blog

vallico2

Well, it’s Tuesday afternoon, there are four days to go before around fifty people will arrive in Vallico Sotto for the ninth Quantum Monte Carlo in the Apuan Alps IX international conference, and you know what? The place looks like a bomb has hit it, the weather forecast is promising days of terrible thunderstorms, and I haven’t even got the Bedouin tent up yet. In the odd moment, I need to find time to do some research so I’ll have something to talk about in my presentation next week. Sigh.

But then again, it’s always like that just before a TTI conference. Just this year it’s a bit worse as the old Institute is having a 10th anniversary revamp. Yes, it’s been ten years since Sam and I opened up for business. Here we are looking youthful and exuberant in 2004 (left) with our first physicist guests Nicole Benedek, Andrea Ma, and Arash Mostofi. Or Professor Mostofi as I should say nowadays. As you can see the previous owners liked any colour so long as it was white.. it’s a bit different now.

guestsarash

So in order to celebrate our first decade (and the monastery’s 1246th year) there will be a party on the Doctor’ Lawn during the evening of Arrivals Day Sat 26th July  – 7.30 onwards, don’t be late. Saska and I are designing a poster to distribute round the village so the locals know to come too, and we’ve got a singer, no less  – the famous Ed Norris, former member of the Ramones and the New York Dolls. See him in action on Youtube here.  He does requests. Catering will be provided by Sam and whoever we can get to volunteer to help, as well as the wonderful Ramona from nearby Fabbriche di Vallico. In addition to Ed and the Village People (the real ones, not the 1970s disco band), we will be welcoming the following scientists from around the world:

Dario Alfè (University College, London, U.K.)
Sam Azadi (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Giovanni Bachelet (Sapienza University, Roma, Italy)
Vincenzo Barone (Scuola Normale, Pisa, Italy) – possibly
Stefano Baroni (SISSA, Trieste, Italy) – possibly
Dario Bressanini (Università dell’Insubria, Italy)
Shibing Chu (Lanzhou University, China)
Ron Cohen (University College, London, U.K.)
Gareth Conduit (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Bruno Cramer (University of Campinas, Brazil)
Csaba Daday (University of Twente, Holland)
Caterina De Franco (University of L’Aquila, Italy)
Roberto Dovesi (University of Torino, Italy)
Andrea Droghetti (Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland)
Neil Drummond (University of Lancaster, U.K.)
Edgar Engel (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Elif Ertekin (University of Illinois, U.S.A.)
Matthew Foulkes (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Leonardo Guidoni (University of L’Aquila, U.K.)
Alex Haider (Lisa’s Room, Cambridge, U.K.)
Nic Harrison (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Kenta Hongo (JAIST, Japan)
Blazej Jaworowski (Wroclaw University of Technology, Poland)
Lisa Johnson-Davies (University of Life, Cambridge)
Martin Korth (University of Ulm, Germany)
Jonathan Lloyd-Williams (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Pierre-Francois Loos (Australian National University, Australia)
Pablo López Ríos (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Ryo Maezono (JAIST, Japan)
Fionn Malone (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Mariapia Marchi (ESTECO S.p.A., Trieste, Italy)
Bartomeu Monserrat-Sanchez (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Elaheh Mostaani (University of Lancaster, U.K.)
Richard Needs (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Carlo Pierleoni (University of L’Aquila, Italy)
Tom Poole (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
James Shepherd (Rice University, U.S.A.)
James Spencer (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Sandro Sorella (SISSA, Trieste, Italy)
Alex Thom (University of Cambridge, Italy)
Mike Towler (University of Cambridge and University College, London, U.K.)
John Trail (University of Cambridge, U.K.)
Cyrus Umrigar (Cornell University, U.S.A.)
Kyra Umrigar (Cyrus’s House, U.S.A.)
Jasmine Umrigar (Cyrus’s House, U.S.A.)
Tack Uyeda (JAIST, Japan)
William Vigor (Imperial College, London, U.K.)
Lucas Wagner (University of Illinois, U.S.A.)
Ching-Ming Wei (Academia Sinica, Taiwa)

Sadly, most of my Cambridge colleagues — in a desperate attempt to save a few quid and to avoid having to do any chores — are coming on the late flight and will miss both their dinner and the singing. Bunch of cheapskates.

Anyway, the final version of the programme document for the conference can be found here. There are six days worth of excellent talks to listen to in the mornings, and in the afternoons most people will be going on refreshing mountain walks and other excursions here in the Apuan Alps National Park, before they reunite in one of the fantastic local restaurants. And before you accuse them of having too good a time at taxpayers expense, they do use the afternoons and evenings to discuss quantum Monte Carlo as well. At least I hope they do. I can’t help it if it’s nice around here.

But back to the bomb site. Let me just post a few photographs to give you a flavour of what’s going on in the monastery at the moment..

Like I said, TTI is having a serious revamp. Here are my bravi ragazzi Marco and Raresh attached to the front of the church a couple of hours ago. I just asked them to paint it, but they’ve insisted on removing all the old paint and mould and doing the job properly so it will look nice for years to come. What a pair of fantastic guys. If you see them at the party, buy them a beer (also Marco the Younger – not shown, though he may be too young to drink – don’t tell his mum).

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They’ve also done a deep scrape of the crumbliest internal wall inside the church, and applied a coating of some sort of glue so that the several kilograms of dust and bits of plaster that annually coat everything beneath will cease to be a problem.

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And as you can see we also have a nice new-painted blackboard:

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The lads are also helping me to get rid of junk which has always been too heavy to cart down the hill, like this hideous second cooker which has been sitting in the kitchen since the day we arrived without ever having cooked anything (I have a vague recollection of it being able to keep plates warm in the first few years..). Still, goodbye!

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Here are the rest of my cleaning team, who sadly seem to spend most of their time hitting each other with mops, rather than actually cleaning anything.

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Ed the Singer will be testing out TTI’s new PA system, as demonstrated here by Jamie Lee Lewis, who is already displaying the correct rock and roll attitude by prominently displaying his arse wherever he goes (that’s in addition to his newly-developed cocaine habit). I wonder if Ed will do that?

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Note we also have some nice new instruments, microphones, and loudspeakers. People missing TTI’s old beige acoustic guitar will be glad to hear it has gone to a good home, as I have donated it to Professor Needs’s son Ralph. Richard was desperately trying to give it back to me earlier this term, but in order to annoy him I have told Ralph to keep it and I’ve bought a colourful new Epiphone electro-acoustic instead..

Marco the Younger has been helping me clear the attic of 100 years worth of dust, rusting agricultural implements, and general detritus, as you can see in the photo below. It’s actually much longer than it looks, and will be a really useful new space (for example, as an emergency shelter for Bedouin Tent inhabitants during the dreadful thunderstorms. This is actually where I sleep on a mattress on a floor during the conference (though in former years only the nearer bit was habitable with the rest screened off by a curtain). Young Lopez Rios gets to sleep in my old comfortable bed on the floor below, for some reason – see the sacrifices I make for our guests’ comfort. Anyway, I’m thinking of converting the end of the attic into a little contemplation space with our little surplus sofa and a bottle of Armagnac, where I can sit and plot my imminent takeover of the world. And do last minute revisions of all those summer school lectures that I never seem to be able to write in time.

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Right at the end of the attic, you can see the new scatola bianca, a complicated box of electronics running TTI’s new university-grade wireless network, which I installed earlier this summer. Every part of the Institute plus Flora’s house next door plus the Doctor’s House will now be covered from here. It will also shortly be possible to connect via ssh into TTI ‘s systems from the outside world, if you can think of a reason to do that.

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It’s also time to attach TTI’s new NAS file server (a  Synology DS1513+ 5 Bay DiskStation
Desktop NAS), which amongst other things will make running summer schools a good deal easier. Ideas for what to store in its 10 terabytes of storage space on a postcard please. Here it is, still in its box. I hope it doesn’t have a Windows-only setup CD. I thought I still had at least one copy of Windows after Pablo’s ‘Everyone must use Ubuntu’ spring cleaning a few years back, but I can’t find one..

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I’m afraid the garden took a bit of a pasting in a giant thunderstorm the other night (which — despite the advantage of allowing me to map the current location of the leaks in the church roof —  also took out the local internet service for an entire day , which is very frustrating when you’re trying to organize a conference). At least some of the pretty flowers are coming out though..

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Earlier this year I read an article in the paper about Crug Farm Plants in Wales, who sell exotic plants from the Mysterious East (the Jungles of Laos, and places like that) which they collect personally on Indiana Jones style expeditions. So the garden now contains seven of these oriental immigrants. A prize for the first person to spot them. I appreciate this isn’t very rock and roll – perhaps I’m getting old.

As you can see below, Sam has been busy sculpting these last few weeks. I continue to marvel in disbelief – why on earth did she marry someone as talentless as me?

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Here’s another sculpture in front of the new sucker machine I’ve installed to extract all the nasty fumes Sam creates when she melts wax with a hot knife. At last the Alien Death Sphere in the church (which is holding up the trunking) has found a use.

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For tenth anniversaries you’ve got to have some fireworks. The two boxes are labelled ‘Nuclear Demolition’ and ‘Power Station 3’,  for some reason,  and there are (cough) a few small rockets in the blue box. Anyone wishing to launch satellites into orbit should contact me for a good price.

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Here’s my currently scruffy desk in the back of the church, where I was sitting a few seconds ago until I got up to take this photograph.

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And I’ll conclude with what Young People Nowadays apparently refer to as a ‘selfie’.

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If you’re travelling to Vallico Sotto this week, I wish you a very pleasant journey. We’re all looking forward to meeting you, and to enjoying some great science and some great company. And if you get some exercise as well, all the better (let’s face it, you do spend too long sitting around behind your desk, don’t you..). I note finally that the only volunteer for the Vallico Sotto against the World football match against the local tough guys later this week is Jasmine Umrigar (aged 13). I hope you’ll all be really embarassed if she beats them.

See you soon!
Mike

[who’s just remembered he has a summer school to organize as well for the week after. Oh God. Why do I do this again?]

 

QMC visit to the Scuola Normale in Pisa

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Sammy and I were in Pisa yesterday at the invitation of Prof. Vincenzo Barone from the Theoretical Chemistry group at the Scuola Normale. Prof. Barone is amongst other things, Professor of Theoretical and Computational Chemistry in Pisa,  President of the Italian Chemical Society, and author of more than 650 publications, which for a young man like me still stuck on around 60 papers is something to aspire to, to say the least.

Despite the literal meaning of ‘Normal School’ – which in English sounds like somewhere you go if you can’t get into a good school –  the Scuola Normale is probably Italy’s most prestigious university – founded in 1810 by Napoleonic decree as the sister  of the École Normale in Paris. It is very much an elite institution, and to become a student there, candidates have to pass an extremely selective admissions exam with only a 6% pass rate – every year only sixty candidates are admitted out of nearly 1000 applicants. The main building is the overwhelmingly beautiful Palazzo della Carovana (pictured above) which was designed and built by Giorgio Vasari in the 1500s as the headquarters of the Knights of Saint Stephen. It is situated in Piazza dei Cavalieri  – the second main square in Pisa and right in the heart of the action. What a fantastic place to work, I have to say!  It certainly beats the modern incarnation of the pebble-dashed prefab Cavendish Laboratory – which was moved out of the centre of Cambridge to a field three miles away in the 1970s. This was done at probably the worst moment in history for British architecture at a cost of only two million pounds and it really shows;  despite inflation that wasn’t very much money back then either.

So anyway I gave a talk aimed at introducing the theoretical chemists to quantum Monte Carlo – like most chemists they focus on small molecules when doing accurate work, and I think they enjoyed being shown applications to crystalline solids and to large systems with an accuracy comparable to their ‘gold standard’  CCSD(T) method. You can tell how smart they all are – I don’t think I’ve ever had so many people asking good questions and so obviously understanding the difficult bits.. As example applications I used a subset of the cases from my last ‘Useful calculations for big complicated systems‘ post on this Blog – once again highlighting the excellent recent work of our American colleagues such as Lucas Wagner, Elif Ertekin, and Jeff Grossman – as well as my recent clathrate calculations with Stephen Cox et al.  So for anyone interested in a single talk introduction to QMC with applications, you can look at my 51 slides here:

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After the talk and a bit of lunch, Sammy and I were taken into the attic of the Palazzo della Carovana to see the ‘3D CAVE‘ of Prof. Barone’s DREAMSLAB (‘Dedicated Research Environment for Advanced Modeling and Simulations’).  With the help of some 3D glasses we were able to move around and interact with scattering data from CERN, a 3D model of a protein, and a reconstruction of an ancient Greek temple in Sicily (I know Sicily isn’t in Greece, but the Greeks were in Sicily once). Really quite stunning – Vasari would have though it black magic. They have a 3D hologram thing  in a glass pyramid as well – I asked the programmer guy Niccolò Albertini if they had done Princess Leia doing ‘Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi – you are our only remaining hope‘ in his spare time, and he had to admit that he had. We also had a go with a developer version of the ‘Oculus Rift’ –  a virtual reality headset apparently about to take the world by storm (Facebook paid 12 billion dollars for it last year). Wandering through a forest I accidentally fell off a 1000 foot cliff, and I swear it hurt when I hit the bottom.. Albertini said: ‘You’re not supposed to be able to do that!’ so it looks like I found a bug. Glad I was able to help.

So anyway, it seems that Prof. Barone and his team liked what they saw, and that they may be getting involved in QMC research in the future. Many thanks to him  (and to Monica Sanna who helped us with practical arrangements) for a great day out. It’ll be interesting to see what happens in Pisa in the future.. especially as it’s only an hour away from my Apuan Alps Centre for Physics. Prof. B. will hopefully be attending this year’s ‘QMC in the Apuan Alps‘ meeting, and I’m sure we will benefit from his extensive knowledge and experience in theoretical chemistry. Looking forward to it.

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QMC at the research frontier: useful calculations for big complicated systems

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Here’s a link to the slides from a talk I gave the other day in the Cavendish Laboratory Electronic Structure Discussion Group here in Cambridge (click the following picture):

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Many people seem to have the impression that QMC is still stuck in the era where DFT was about 20 years ago, and that we’re restricted to calculating the lattice constant of silicon and similar tedious stuff. The idea with this talk was therefore to attempt to answer the question “Is diffusion Monte Carlo ready to solve genuine scientific problems – in ‘green environmental-type research’, say – possibly involving big and complicated systems, on reasonable timescales on today’s computers“? I will show – partly through a review of the recent literature on problems of relevance to energy research – that it most certainly is (and, almost incidentally, that attempting to use DFT for most of the problems highlighted is likely to lead to wrong answers).

The talk – which focusses on recent work of our American colleagues such as Lucas Wagner, Elif Ertekin, Richard Hennig, and Jeff Grossman and their collaborators (who frequently visit us in our summer meetings in Vallico Sotto) – includes summaries of applications involving  hydrogen storage, defect energetics, photovoltaics, water chemistry and solvation, database generation, and even strongly-correlated systems such as metal-insulator transitions in oxides and coupling of lattice, charge, and spin degrees of freedom in superconducting cuprates.’

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Much of the content of the slides was nicked or summarized from the papers discussed (and from a recent review article by Lucas) – full references are given and you are encouraged to read the original papers instead.

Enjoy! All comments welcome..

Mike

Mike Towler’s Jerry Lee Lewis set list

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Part of my long campaign to become a Jerry Lee Lewis impersonator: the twenty-three songs I would play at the Vallico Sotto Star Club, if I were better at learning music by ear and could sing in the proper rock and roll style, which at present makes me cough. The instruments are in the building; what is missing is a band. If you can help, by playing, singing or transcribing, let me know. This is some of the most exciting popular music ever recorded.

Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano in concert, his right arm raised

Jerry Lee Lewis died on 28 October 2022, at home in Mississippi, aged eighty-seven, the last of the Million Dollar Quartet in the photograph below.

To get you in the mood, here is some of the only good colour footage of him from the 1960s, with Tom Jones on Tom’s own television show: Jerry Lee Lewis and Tom Jones. They are only fooling about, but these are two great performers at the height of their powers.

Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash at Sun Studio
The Million Dollar Quartet at Sun Studio, Memphis, 4 December 1956: Jerry Lee Lewis, Carl Perkins, Elvis Presley and Johnny Cash.

Live at the Vallico Sotto Star Club, some time in the future

Records, film clips and television. Some of the sound is rough, and the CD is better. Headphones, volume at maximum.

  1. Mean Woman Blues, from Live at the Star Club, Hamburg: listen.
    Live at the Star Club, Hamburg
  2. Money, from Live at the Star Club: listen.
    Live at the Star Club, Hamburg
  3. Lewis Boogie: the Sun record; and a very good impersonation by Waylon Payne in the Johnny Cash film Walk the Line, here.
    Jerry Lee Lewis
  4. High School Confidential: the record, with too much guitar for us; the opening of the 1958 film, the best piano-only version; live in 1964, teenagers going wild again; and live at the Star Club, the best live version.
    High School Confidential
  5. I’m on Fire: the Mercury single, overproduced, the piano hard to hear; live on Granada Television, 1964; and the version he recorded for the 1989 film, an older voice but a good solo.
    I'm on Fire
  6. I Believe in You, for the solo: listen.
  7. Hit the Road Jack. Required: three backing singers with very high voices, or gentlemen with a falsetto; and we lose the saxophone and the Mercury production and play it sparer. The record; and Ray Charles’s original.
  8. Drinkin’ Wine Spo-Dee-O-Dee, the song he played at his first public performance, at a car dealership in Ferriday, Louisiana, at fourteen; the title is said to stand in for a phrase no 1950s radio station would broadcast. The record; and a surprisingly excellent version from 1973.
  9. It’ll Be Me: listen. It grows on you; love the solo. The scratchy rhythm in the background is a washboard, and the Academy has one, with metal thimbles.
  10. Pink Pedal Pushers: listen. It always reminds me of one of my favourite Stray Cats songs, Stray Cat Strut.
  11. Lovin’ Up a Storm: listen.
  12. Rockin’ My Life Away: listen.
  13. Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On. “No group, be it Beatles, Dylan or Stones, have ever improved on ‘Whole Lotta Shakin’’ for my money,” John Lennon told Rolling Stone in 1970. The Sun record; live on Granada Television, 1964, watch the audience; The Steve Allen Show, 1957, the television appearance that made him famous; and Dennis Quaid’s version in the 1989 film, which recreates it.
    Dancing
  14. Crazy Arms, his first record for Sun: listen.
    Crazy Arms
    Sam Phillips of Sun Records takes ‘Crazy Arms’, hot off the press, to the radio station.
  15. I’ll Sail My Ship Alone: listen.
  16. Lucille. Little Richard’s original is better than Jerry Lee’s, but I can’t sing like that and probably nobody else can either; here he is live in 1963. The Jerry Lee versions online are all a little slow, so ours would follow Little Richard.
  17. You Win Again: the record, the B-side of ‘Great Balls of Fire’, no less; and live in 1963. I can play this one.
  18. She Was My Baby: listen. Comedy gold.
  19. What’d I Say: the record; live at the Star Club, awesome; and Ray Charles’s original, so slow, and still awesome.

Encores

  1. Wild One, for the trick of standing on the keyboard, as Dennis Quaid does it in the film: the original.
    Jerry Lee Lewis and Dennis Quaid
  2. Lust of the Blood, from the 1974 rock Othello, Catch My Soul, with Jerry Lee as Iago. “Jerry Lee Lewis singing Shakespeare. That’s what this show is all about,” said Bob Dylan on his radio show. Jerry Lee in Catch My Soul.
    Jerry Lee Lewis as Iago in Catch My Soul
  3. Good Golly Miss Molly, live at the Star Club, just for fun, since we will never find anyone who drums like Barry Jenkins of the Nashville Teens, later of the Animals: listen on the album.
    Live at the Star Club
  4. Your Cheatin’ Heart, live at the Star Club, a slow one to finish, because I agree with the reviewer who called it “a one man tour-de-force”: listen.
    Live at the Star Club

And Great Balls of Fire?

You may be wondering why it is not here. I find it a little over-familiar, and foolishly left it off. You should still watch Dennis Quaid, as Jerry Lee in the 1989 film, setting fire to the piano before Chuck Berry has to follow him; and the real Jerry Lee with Quaid on the set in 1988, still the real thing.

There you go. Hope you enjoyed it.