Jupyter widgets and extensions for education and research in computational physics and chemistry

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Du, Dou, Baird, Taylor J., Eimre, Kristjan, Bonella, Sara, Pizzi, Giovanni
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Du, Dou
Baird, Taylor J.
Eimre, Kristjan
Bonella, Sara
Pizzi, Giovanni
author_facet Du, Dou
Baird, Taylor J.
Eimre, Kristjan
Bonella, Sara
Pizzi, Giovanni
contents Interactive notebooks are a precious tool for creating graphical user interfaces and teaching materials. Python and Jupyter are becoming increasingly popular in this context, with Jupyter widgets at the core of the interactive functionalities. However, while packages and libraries which offer a broad range of general-purpose widgets exist, there is limited development of specialized widgets for computational physics, chemistry and materials science. This deficiency implies significant time investments for the development of effective Jupyter notebooks for research and education in these domains. Here, we present custom Jupyter widgets that we have developed to target the needs of these communities. These widgets constitute high-quality interactive graphical components and can be employed, for example, to visualize and manipulate data, or to explore different visual representations of concepts, clarifying the relationships existing between them. In addition, we discuss with one example how similar functionality can be exposed in the form of JupyterLab extensions, modifying the JupyterLab interface for an enhanced user experience when working with applications within the targeted scientific domains.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_06113
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Jupyter widgets and extensions for education and research in computational physics and chemistry
Du, Dou
Baird, Taylor J.
Eimre, Kristjan
Bonella, Sara
Pizzi, Giovanni
Physics Education
Materials Science
Interactive notebooks are a precious tool for creating graphical user interfaces and teaching materials. Python and Jupyter are becoming increasingly popular in this context, with Jupyter widgets at the core of the interactive functionalities. However, while packages and libraries which offer a broad range of general-purpose widgets exist, there is limited development of specialized widgets for computational physics, chemistry and materials science. This deficiency implies significant time investments for the development of effective Jupyter notebooks for research and education in these domains. Here, we present custom Jupyter widgets that we have developed to target the needs of these communities. These widgets constitute high-quality interactive graphical components and can be employed, for example, to visualize and manipulate data, or to explore different visual representations of concepts, clarifying the relationships existing between them. In addition, we discuss with one example how similar functionality can be exposed in the form of JupyterLab extensions, modifying the JupyterLab interface for an enhanced user experience when working with applications within the targeted scientific domains.
title Jupyter widgets and extensions for education and research in computational physics and chemistry
topic Physics Education
Materials Science
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.06113