Semester page for FYS3150 - Autumn 2018

Teachers

Extension of deadline for project 4 and plans for this week for FYS3150/4150

Dear All, since many of you have asked for it and in order that it feels fair for everybody, we extend the deadline to Wednesday Nov 21, 23.59.

If you have already handed in, you can as usual update the project. 

Hope this helps and best wishes to everybody,

Morten

 

p.s. Else, this week is our second last week and we will discuss in more detail the solution of partial differential equations, in particular the diffusion equation, Poisson's equation and the wave equation in 1 or more dimensions. The material is covered by chapter 10 of the lecture notes. At the lab we start working with project 5. 

21. nov. 2018 07:26

FYS3150/4150 weekly update and final projects

Dear all, here comes the weekly fys3150/4150 update.

At the link http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/web/course, or by doing a git pull, you will find 6 variants for project 5. We will discuss these this week (tomorrow Anders, Mathias and Anna will discuss some of the above projects) while the theory for the partial differential equation projects will be discussed for the rest of the semester. 

There may be further edits to the projects as soon as we find typos etc.  Stay tuned. In particular, the MD project may undergo some further edits. I am not too happy with its present layout.

The projects are

1) a quantum mechanical Monte Carlo calculation of project 2, see chapter 14...

14. nov. 2018 14:55

Good morning everybody!

Here follows a short update of our plans for this week and next week.

On Thursday we will wrap up our discussion of random number generators (see chapter 11 of the lecture notes) and discuss how to perform quantum mechanical calculations (chapter 14) with Monte Carlo methods. We will also bring in a more technical discussion on how to compute properly errors in Monte Carlo calculations and discuss briefly what is called the central limit theorem. This ends our discussion of Monte Carlo methods. On Friday we start with our last topic, namely a discussion of partial differential equations. This will also be one of the topics for two variants of project 5. Next week we will discuss these various variants for project 5 and continue the discussion of partial differential equations. This topic will keep us busy for the rest of the semester. Week 48, the last week (November 26-30) we will have a lecture on Thursday 29...

8. nov. 2018 04:24

Weekly fys3150/4150 update

Hi all, we hope the week started the best possible way!

Last week we discussed in detail project 4 but we scratched only the surface of the Metropolis algorithm and the mathematics of random walks, Markov chains etc. Thursday we will derive the Metropolis algorithm (chapter 12 of the lecture notes) and end our discussion of project 4 on Friday. On Friday we will go back to a discussion of random number generators and also discuss properties of random numbers and statistical variables. This will lead us to a better understanding of errors in our calculations. This material is covered by chapter 11. 

Else, at the lab, for all sessions (except Friday at 1415 due to a PhD defense) we will discuss how to parallelize the Ising model. We will do some live programming there and write our first program using MPI and OpenMP.  The material is covered by the lecture slides in...

31. okt. 2018 16:59

Weekly update FYS3150/4150

First, thx to everybody for heroic efforts with project 3. We really appreciate this! 

Here's a short update on plans for this week, week 43. 

We will discuss project 4, scroll down http://compphysics.github.io/ComputationalPhysics/doc/web/course to project 4, and the theory needed. This is largely covered by chapter 12 of the lectures notes, with an emphasis on

Markov chains and the Metropolis algorithm and chapter 13 on statistical physics. 

The model we will study is the famous Ising model, a model which has been widely used to study interacting systems, from studies of phase transitions to even analysis of elections in political science and sociology.  The model, its two-dimensional variant has also analytic solutions, thanks to Lars Ons...

25. okt. 2018 04:02

Weekly FYS3150/4150

Dear All, welcome to a new exciting week! 

We hope all is well with project 3. Last week we discussed how to object orient project 3 and discussed partly in lectures and at the lab how to write an object oriented code. 

This week we will during the lecture on Thursday wrap up this discussion with respect to project 3.

However, the focus this week will be on Monte Carlo methods. We will start with Monte Carlo integration,

and discuss topics like probability distribution functions (PDF), random numbers, smart Monte Carlo integration and then slightly move into the field of Markov chains. Project 4 will be available next Thursday and will deal with Monte Carlo simulations. 

The material taught this week is covered by chapte...

16. okt. 2018 15:03

FYS3150/4150 weekly update

Hi all, just a very brief note here. 

This week we will finalize (Thursday the discussion of gaussian quadrature and integration of low-dimensional integral), then we move over to Monte Carlo methods. Our first encounter will focus on numerical integration with Monte Carlo methods for multi-dimensional integrals. Monte Carlo methods applied to different systems and Markov processes, the Metropolis algorithm, random numbers etc are topics that will keep us busy the next 4-5 weeks, before we move on to partial differential equations towards the end of the semester. Numerical integration using Gaussian quadrature is covered by the lecture notes chapter 5 and the slides ...

10. okt. 2018 22:06

Weekly update FYS3150/4150

Dear All, here comes the weekly fys3150/4150 update.

 

Last week we started discussing the basic algorithms for solving ordinary differential equations, with an emphasis on the Verlet methods and the Runge-Kutta methods.

We started discussing project 3 as well. The project is available at the GitHub link of the course, go to for example https://github.com/CompPhysics/ComputationalPhysics/tree/master/doc/Projects/2018/Project3 and you will find pdf, html and jupyter notebook versions. 

There is only variant (although we discussed the possibility of other ones). The project deals with writing a code for the solar system and  can also be used for the variant of project...

3. okt. 2018 08:30

Good morning to everybody!  

We hope the week has started the best possible way!  Last week we finalized our discussion on eigenvalue solvers with Householder's algorithm and how to find the eigenvalues of a tridiagonal matrix (the code tqli discussed in the c++ library at https://github.com/CompPhysics/ComputationalPhysics/tree/master/doc/Programs/LecturePrograms/programs/cppLibrary implements this algorithm). We did not discuss iterative methods like Lanczo's method however. We will mention this method when we begin on Thursday. Else, the rest of the week is devoted to differential equations, see chapter 8 of the lecture notes and discussion of project 3 on Friday. 

We will revisit the Euler family of methods and derive the popular velocity...

25. sep. 2018 09:22

Welcome back to a new exciting week!!

Last week we discussed methods for solving eigenvalue problems, with an emphasis on the Jacobi method and project 2.

This week we will continue with a discussion of project 2 and look at so-called QR transformations, with an emphasis on Householder's method and algorithms for finding eigenvalues of tridiagonal matrices. We will also discuss iterative Krylov methods (Lanczos's algorithm in particular and if we get time also power methods.

 

The material is discussed in chapter 7 of the lecture notes and the slides on eigenvalues. 

Else, if we get time, we will start a discussion of ordinary differential equations (chapter 8 of the lecture notes).  These equations are everywhere in science and will prepare us for the solution of project 3. 

 

At the lab we will sneak a small session on ho...

18. sep. 2018 09:35