QUANTUM ESPRESSO is an integrated suite of computer codes for electronic-structure calculations and materials modeling, based on density-functional theory, plane waves, and pseudopotentials (norm-conserving, ultrasoft, and projector-augmented wave). The acronym ESPRESSO stands for opEn Source Package for Research in Electronic Structure, Simulation, and Optimization. It is freely available to researchers around the world under the terms of the GNU General Public License. QUANTUM ESPRESSO builds upon newly-restructured electronic-structure codes that have been developed and tested by some of the original authors of novel electronic-structure algorithms and applied in the last twenty years by some of the leading materials modeling groups worldwide. Innovation and efficiency are still its main focus, with special attention paid to massively parallel architectures, and a great effort being devoted to user friendliness. QUANTUM ESPRESSO is evolving towards a distribution of independent and interoperable codes in the spirit of an open-source project, where researchers active in the field of electronic-structure calculations are encouraged to participate in the project by contributing their own codes or by implementing their own ideas into existing codes.

Quantum ESPRESSO is an integrated suite of open-source computer codes for quantum simulations of materials using state-of-the art electronic-structure techniques, based on density-functional theory, density-functional perturbation theory, and many-body perturbation theory, within the plane-wave pseudo-potential and projector-augmented-wave approaches. Quantum ESPRESSO owes its popularity to the wide variety of properties and processes it allows to simulate, to its performance on an increasingly broad array of hardware architectures, and to a community of researchers that rely on its capabilities as a core open-source development platform to implement theirs ideas. In this paper we describe recent extensions and improvements, covering new methodologies and property calculators, improved parallelization, code modularization, and extended interoperability both within the distribution and with external software.

Quantum ESPRESSO is an open-source distribution of computer codes for quantum-mechanical materials modeling, based on density-functional theory, pseudopotentials, and plane waves, and renowned for its performance on a wide range of hardware architectures, from laptops to massively parallel computers, as well as for the breadth of its applications. In this paper, we present a motivation and brief review of the ongoing effort to port Quantum ESPRESSO onto heterogeneous architectures based on hardware accelerators, which will overcome the energy constraints that are currently hindering the way toward exascale computing.

The phase diagrams of water and ammonia were determined by constant pressure ab initio molecular dynamic simulations at pressures (30 to 300 gigapascal) and temperatures (300 to 7000 kelvin) of relevance for the middle ice layers of the giant planets Neptune and Uranus. Along the planetary isentrope water and ammonia behave as fully dissociated ionic, electronically insulating fluid phases, which turn metallic at temperatures exceeding 7000 kelvin for water and 5500 kelvin for ammonia. At lower temperatures, the phase diagrams of water and ammonia exhibit a superionic solid phase between the solid and the ionic liquid. These simulations improve our understanding of the properties of the middle ice layers of Neptune and Uranus.

We present a new high-performance configuration interaction code optimally designed for the calculation of the lowest energy eigenstates of a few electrons in semiconductor quantum dots (also called artificial atoms) in the strong interaction regime. The implementation relies on a singleparticle representation, but it is independent of the choice of the single-particle basis and, therefore, of the details of the device and configuration of external fields. Assuming no truncation of the Fock space of Slater determinants generated from the chosen single-particle basis, the code may tackle regimes where Coulomb interaction very effectively mixes many determinants. Typical strongly correlated systems lead to very large diagonalization problems; in our implementation, the secular equation is reduced to its minimal rank by exploiting the symmetry of the effective-mass interacting Hamiltonian, including square total spin. The resulting Hamiltonian is diagonalized via parallel implementation of the Lanczos algorithm. The code gives access to both wave functions and energies of first excited states. Excellent code scalability in a parallel environment is demonstrated; accuracy is tested for the case of up to eight electrons confined in a two-dimensional harmonic trap as the density is progressively diluted up to the Wigner regime, where correlations become dominant. Comparison with previous Quantum Monte Carlo simulations in the Wigner regime demonstrates power and flexibility of the method.

Attempts to resolve the energy-level structure of single DNA molecules by scanning tunnelling spectroscopy span over the past two decades, owing to the unique ability of this technique to probe the local density of states of objects deposited on a surface. Nevertheless, success was hindered by extreme technical difficulties in stable deposition and reproducibility. Here, by using scanning tunnelling spectroscopy at cryogenic temperature, we disclose the energy spectrum of poly(G)-poly(C) DNA molecules deposited on gold. The tunnelling current-voltage (I-V ) characteristics and their derivative (dI/dV -V ) curves at 78 K exhibit a clear gap and a peak structure around the gap. Limited fluctuations in the I-V curves are observed and statistically characterized. By means of ab initio density functional theory calculations, the character of the observed peaks is generally assigned to groups of orbitals originating from the different molecular components, namely the nucleobases, the backbone and the counterions.The electrical properties of single double-stranded DNA molecules have attracted great interest in the past two decades, leading to a series of experiments 1-3 to study the electron transfer and conduction through single DNA molecules and in various aggregation forms 4,5 . Nearly all of the single-molecule experiments addressed the conductivity along molecules that are attached to electrodes at the molecule ends. Besides fixing many chemical and physical properties, the intrinsic electronic structure of an object also determines its response to an external electric field. Hence, it is desirable to get this knowledge for DNA to understand its suitability to support electrical currents and the viable transport mechanisms. Scanning tunnelling spectroscopy (STS) is the technique of choice for measuring the electronic density of states (DOS) of a single molecule 6 , as was demonstrated through the years for various carbon nanostructures 7,8 , molecular objects 9 and inorganic nanoparticles 10 deposited on substrates.Following the invention of the scanning tunnelling microscope (STM) in 1982, there was a substantial number of attempts to measure single DNA molecules using STM. However, whereas several groups showed high-resolution images with quite detailed structure of the DNA molecules [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18] , direct tunnelling spectroscopy across the helices was reported only a few times 18-21 and clear interpretation was inhibited by technical hurdles 22 . In all of these studies, DNA-salt aggregates or very short DNA oligomers with no clear orientation were measured. Moreover, the STS measurements of DNA were always done at room temperature, making it impossible to resolve the electronic levels within the thermal noise.Theoretical predictions for the DNA electronic structure, commonly based on molecular quantum mechanics calculations such as density functional theory 23,24 (DFT) or Hartree-Fock 25 , cannot be conclusive. In fact, the lack of clear experimental data for single DNA molecules hinders the...

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The Quantum-ESPRESSO package is a multipurpose and multi-platform software for ab-initio calculations of condensed matter (periodic and disordered) systems. Codes in the package are based on density functional theory and on a plane wave/pseudopotential description of the electronic ground state and are ideally suited for structural optimizations (both at zero and at finite temperature), linear response calculations (phonons, elastic constants, dielectric and Raman tensors, etc.) and high-temperature molecular dynamics. Examples of applications of the codes included in the package are briefly discussed.