pandas dependency specification

Hi, I develop a package that interacts with `mlipaudit`, and so `e3j` via `mlip`, and am encountering some conflict issues due to `e3j`'s `pandas` dependency:

```
pandas ~= 2.2.2
```

This is fairly strict, as it doesn't include `pandas>=2.3`, so I wanted to check if this is necessary, or if perhaps could be relaxed? I couldn't actually see anywhere where `pandas` is imported in the current codebase.

Locate the project’s dependency metadata and search the codebase for pandas imports or version-specific usage. Confirm whether the ~= 2.2.2 constraint is needed, then update or retain it based on that check and verify the package’s dependency or test workflow succeeds with the supported pandas versions.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.