Plans for the week of February 12-16

Dear all, welcome back to FYS4411/9411.

This week we aim at, after a review of what we did last week, to start with the optimization part. That is how to find the optimal variational parameters without having to run a full scale calculation for all selected parameters.

Before we start with the optimization part, please do take a look at the slides from last week concerning the expressions for the kinetic energy and the quantum force with a given trial wave function. You find those notes at the end of the notes from last week (week 4), see for example https://github.com/CompPhysics/ComputationalPhysics2/blob/gh-pages/doc/pub/week4/ipynb/week4.ipynb

The plan for the lecture this Friday is thus to

Review from last week with an emphasis on computational aspects in calculating gradients and kinetic energies for various wave functions

Reminder on Fokker-Planck equation and Langevin equations

Start optimization: Expressions for derivatives as functions of the variational parameters

Newton's method, gradient descent, Steepest descent and Conjugate Gradient Descent

After the lecture, we will have our lab session where we work on the project.

Teaching Material, videos and written material.

Lecture notes for week 5 at https://github.com/CompPhysics/ComputationalPhysics2/blob/gh-pages/doc/pub/week5/ipynb/week5.ipynb

Recommended background literature, Convex Optimization by Boyd and Vandenberghe. Their lecture slides are very useful (warning, these are some 300 pages). See https://web.stanford.edu/~boyd/cvxbook/bv_cvxslides.pdf

Best wishes to you all, and don't hesitate to contact us.

Daniel, H?kon and Morten