This course consists of four projects that must be completed before you may attend the exam. The projects have several aims:
- To provide experience with developing various codes relevant for problems in Statistical Physics
- To use the codes to develop intuition for some of the main concepts in Statistical Physics
- To learn how to measure statistical properties in simulations with many particles
- To provide a deeper insight into the role of fluctuations, finite size effects, and scaling concepts used in modern statistical physics.
The lectures will support the various projects, and will therefore vary from more theoretical when addressing percolation, to more practical when addressing atomic modeling.
Project 1: Atomic Modeling of Liquids
- For an introduction to molecular dynamics, see
- chapter 4 in Frenkel and Smit - Understanding Molecular Simulation
- chapters from Thermal and Statistical Physics Using Python (Ch03 provides an introduction to molecular dynamics. The beginning of Ch04 demonstrates how to set up a lammps simulation and extract data. Ch05 provides an example of how to run many lammps simulations and compile the results). The lammps_logfile can be found here
- Example code for simple molecular dynamics (without forces, just a shell)
- Example code for parallel molecular dynamics and geometries (advanced implementation)
Project 2: Atomic modeling of nanoporous media
- For an introduction to flow in porous media see chapter 4, 6 and 7 in Flow in porous media textbook
Project 3: Percolation
- Percolation textbook (Curriculum: Ch. 1,2,4,5,6,8, and 11 or 13.)
- Python versions of the percolation walk scripts are located here: exwalk.py, walk.py, exflow.py, percwalk.py .
Project 4: Final Project