Computational Physics Education

 Computational Physics Course – taught first in Tel Aviv and then for for several years at the Technion by Joan Adler. Double use: teach techniques to future computational physicists and incidentally prepare animations for teaching physics (especially modern physics); in some cases useful models for the graduate student’s research. I personally place emphasis on visualization, either with the group AViz code for atoms, or with PGPLOT. The group also developed a graphical method for series analysis for critical phenomena; see below.

Lecture notes avaliable on-site at the Technion, link on request  by email (phr76ja@technion.ac.il)  for Technion/Harmony use, others may ask Joan Adler to place on Researchgate.

The 2016/7 homepage  at:

http://phjoan5.technion.ac.il/~comphy

Course Outline:

Lectures, homework and a project – making an html site for a code for a project related either to the student’s research or a topic in the undergraduate syllabus. Sites must include codes and visualizations.

Several research papers about the sites.

INTRODUCTION:

History, hardware, software, communications, manuals, consultants and help files, the Web revolution, somputer security.

BASIC METHODS of COMPUTATIONAL PHYSICS:

(KOONIN, Chapter 1 and GOULD and TOBOCHNIK, Chapters 1 and 2)

Simulation, enumeration, algebraic manipulation and solution of equations.

Numerical differentiation, numerical quadrature, finding roots.

ORDINARY DIFFERENTIAL EQUATIONS:

(KOONIN, Chapter 2 and GOULD and TOBOCHNIK, Chapter 7)

Methods, order and chaos.

MONTE CARLO SIMULATION:

(KOONIN, Chapter 8 and GOULD and TOBOCHNIK, Chapter 10-12, 14-16)

Random variables, Ising model, Percolation, Monte Carlo Integration

SELECTED TOPICS:

Molecular Dynamics (GOULD and TOBOCHNIK, Chapter 6), QUANTUM DYNAMICS (KOONIN Chapters 3-5, GOULD and TOBOCHNIK, Chapter   17) Schroedinger equations, more about parallel computing and GPUs.

 

Many of the student’s websites on the wayback machine under the link on the group homepage.

poster about some websites     and an article about G. Zeltyn and Segal projects here