Semester page for FYS3150 - Autumn 2017

Dear All, this is,sadly, our last week!  

Since we have covered most of the material on partial differential equations, what remains is a summary of the course, plus a short discussion of the projects. This means that we will only have a lecture this Thursday, and we will start at 9.15am (no need to come earlier). The lab sessions will run as normal, both Thursday and Friday and we will have pizza around 1pm at Friday. We may also, if wanted, have some separate discussion sessions for the various project variants. Please let us know if this is of interest.

Thus, no lectures on Friday and only a summary (with some discussion of the projects, in particular the molecular dynamics one) on Thursday, starting at 9.15am. Lab as normal+pizza on Friday around ¡«1pm.

Best wishes to you all and see you at the lab soon,

and thanks so much a wonderful tim...

Dear All, first, thanks again for heroic efforts with project 4 and for fantastic reports on project 3. We are aiming to send you all feedback on project 4 by December 3. Let me also know if you can see on devilry the points on project 3. I am not sure if you can see them. 

Else, there are only two weeks left of the semester sadly!  We will use our last lectures on partial differential equations and for those of you dealing with the two PDE versions project 5, we will this week (Thursday and Friday) discuss the two-dimensional solution of the diffusion equation and the Poisson/Laplace equations. Furthermore, an explicit scheme for these equations will also be discussed. On Friday we will also discuss parts of the molecular dynamics project. The Monte Carlo project was discussed partly last Thursday. It is a slightly simpler, from a simulation point of view, project than the Ising model one from project 4. 

The last week (...

Dear All,

here's our weekly digest!

-I changed the deadline for project 4 till November 19 (Sunday). Project 3 had also a deadline on a Sunday.

-Project 5 has also a new deadline, December 10 instead of December 8. 

-I corrected also a typo in the last part of project 4, there was an erroneous lattice size of L=140. This has been corrected to 100. 

-Project 5 has presently 4 versions, 2 on PDEs, one on Monte Carlo and one on Molecular Dynamics (extension of project 3) and will be made available this weekend or next Monday at latest. Stay tuned on Github and read messages from piazza.

Else, this week we will discuss random number generators properly, discuss how to test them and discuss how to quantify errors, an often neglected topic.  This material is covered by chapter 11 of the lecture notes. 

If we get time, we will on Friday start our discussion of partial differential equations....

Dear All, 

first a small correction to the weekly plan from the UiO admin. We do have a lecture tomorrow, but we have to move to Lille Fysiske Auditorium (one floor below our normal auditorium). We should be able to fit in  all. Thus, the weekly UiO plan is not correctly updated and there will be lectures tomorrow and Friday as well. 

Our normal classroom is however occupied. 

Else, tomorrow we will derive and discuss the Metropolis algorithm (chapter 12, 12.5 in particular) and link it with project 4 (details in chapter 13). We will also continue this discussion on Friday. Friday we will also discuss how to generate random numbers and how to use the

C++ class called random, see http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/random/?kw=rando...

Hi all, project 4 is now availbale and we will discuss it tomorrow and Friday during the lectures. The topic is the simulation of phase transitions for magnetic systems using a binary model, that is the interacting object can only take two values. The model is the so-called Ising model, widely used in many scientific applications, from statistical studies to modeling of phase transitions in chemistry and physics. 

The model is described in chapter 13 of the lecture notes and we will start with discussing some simple properties and how to implement the model numerically.  We will simulate this system using the famous Metropolis algorithm, which is a special implementation of a so-called Markov chain. Markov chains and the Metropolis algorithm will also be discussed dur...

Hi all, sorry for the last moment update. This week we start with Monte Carlo methods and that will keep us busy till almost the middle of November. We will start with Monte Carlo integration (chapter 11) and then move into 

random walks and Markov Chain Monte Carlo (chapter 12) during Friday's lecture. We will however jump a little back and forth between chapters 11 and 12. Some of the material (how to generate random numbers) will be discussed later, while we will try to derive the Metropolis algorithm by the end of this week og the beginning of next week. Project 4 (not yet settled) will deal with Monte Carlo methods. There will also be two variants of project 5 which deal with MC methods.

Else, I have already received proposals for project 5 (one on the diffusion equation and one on the wave equation related to geoscience, mechanics and mathematics). If you have ideas for project five, please let us know, preferentially not later than end of O...

Hi all, this week's update wth ditto plans will be short!

First a message, due to midterms there is no lecture on Friday (the auditorium has been reserved for high-school students without me being informed!!). We have however a regular lecture tomorrow and the lab runs as normal from 10am-6pm (10-18).

Thus, lecture tomorrow 8-10am, no lecture on Friday and lab as normal. 

At the lab we will continue our work on project 3 and discuss object orientation and technicalities about the project.

The lecture tomorrow covers numerical integration with an emphasis on gaussian quadrature. This will serve as our motivation for starting the discussion on Monte carlo methods next week. Then we will start with Monte Carlo integration and move to Monte carlo simulations of different systems. The Monte Carlo series of lectures will keep us busy for almost a month (4-5 weeks of lectures).  Thereafter we end the semester discussing p...

Hi all again!  

Project 3 is now available, a simple git pull gives you everything new or just use the quick link at http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/web/course and scroll down to Project 3.

The source files (html and latex and pdf++) are at https://github.com/CompPhysics/ComputationalPhysics/tree/master/doc/Projects/2017/Project3

This week we will discuss in more detail project 3, which deals with the development of a code that simulates the solar system. We will discuss the equations, proper scaling of the equations  and how to turn them into a general...

Dear all, 

last week we almost ended our discussion of eigenvalue solvers, chapter 7 of the lecture notes. This week on Thursday (tomorrow) we will use the first lecture to summarize our discussion of eigenvalue solver as well as project 2. This discussion includes also a mention of iterative eigenvalue solvers like Lanczos' method. 

Thereafter we begin with a new topic, namely the solution of ordinary differential equations. This material is covered by chapter 8 of the lecture notes. We will also use this to introduce and motivate the use of object orientation and classes. This lays also the ground for project 3, which deals with sets of coupled ordinary differential equations. Since we will have many such coupled equations with similar structures, object orientation makes life much easier. We start tomorrow with the basics behind the solution of ordinary differential equ...

Dear all, I hope this week started the best possible way for you all. Here comes the weekly digest.

Last week we started with eigenvalue problems and went through the basic philosophy of orthogonal transformations and discussed in more detail Jacobi's method (chapter 7.1-7.4 of the lecture notes). This method is not the most efficient one but offers several pedagogical benefits (easy to implement and offers a simple geometrical interpretation).   We started also to discuss project 2. We will continue our discussion of project 2 (in particular the two-electron case)  and link our results with the analytical ones presented by M Taut in https://journals.aps.org/pra/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevA.48.3561

This will allow us to benchmark our code against analytical solutions. Table 1 of that article contain...