Helical boundary conditions

Template:One source In mathematics, helical boundary conditions are a variation on periodic boundary conditions. Helical boundary conditions provide a method for determining the index of a lattice site's neighbours when each lattice site is indexed by just a single coordinate. On a lattice of dimension d where the lattice sites are numbered from 1 to N and L is the width (i.e. number of elements per row) of the lattice in all but the last dimension, the neighbors of site i are:

• $(i\pm 1)modN$
• $(i\pm L)modN$
• $\dots$
• $(i\pm L^{d-1})modN$

where the modulo operator is used. It is not necessary that N = L^d. Helical boundary conditions make it possible to use only one coordinate to describe arbitrary-dimensional lattices.

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