Plotting

To help you plot your results, Z2Pack contains a few convenience functions in the z2pack.plot submodule.

• z2pack.plot.wcc() plots the WCC and (optionally) their largest gap.

• z2pack.plot.chern() plots the sum of WCC (polarization).

• z2pack.plot.wcc_symmetry() plots the WCC and their largest gap. The WCC are colored according to the expectation value of a given operator.

The simplest way of using these plotting functions is by just passing them a surface result.

import z2pack
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

result = ...
z2pack.plot.wcc(result)
plt.show()

Because Z2Pack uses matplotlib to create the plots, plt.show() will show the plot on screen.

To get more control over how the plot looks, you can also create the figure and axis yourself and then pass the axis as a keyword argument.

result = ...
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
z2pack.plot.wcc(result, axis=ax)
# modify the axis labels etc.
ax.set_xticks([0, 1])
ax.set_xticklabels(['a', 'b'])
plt.savefig('path_to_figure.pdf')

The same technique can be used to combine multiple plots into one figure.

Finally, there are keyword arguments (named settings, wcc_settings or gap_settings) which are passed to the matplotlib function creating the plot. They can be changed to modify the appearance of the different markers. Please consult the reference to see the default values for these. The following example shows how to change the color of the markers and lines in z2pack.plot.chern() from red to blue.

result = ...
z2pack.plot.chern(
    result,
    settings=dict(
        marker='o',
        color='b',
        markerfacecolor='b'
    )
)