general information

Location:  MPHYS 109 Time:  11:30 - 12:20h (Monday & Wednesday) Lab:  15:00 - 17:00h (Wednesday in MPHYS 330A)   Instructor:  Helmut Katzgraber   Office:  MPHY 409 Phone: (979) 276-6067 E-mail: firstname[at]lastname.org   Hours:  By appointment via email.   Reqs:  PHYS601, PHYS603, PHYS606, PHYS607, knowledge of C or C++ and a scripting language (perl, python)   Books:  See literature list provided in class   Grading:  Lab (25%)   Homework (25%)   Semester project (30%)   Semester project report in LaTeX (10%)   Semester project presentation (10%)   TA:  Amin Barzegar (MPHYS 412)     Note: You must score 70% or higher in the Lab work to pass the course. Although homework and lab combined only count 50%, I highly encourage you to do the homework sets regularly. You are allowed to miss one lab that will not be counted towards the final grade. However, you will have to show me a university-approved excuse. A 10-point grade scale will be used and no curve will be made. I encourage you to use email as a means of communicating with me about any problems concerning the course: questions about the material from lecture, about the homework problems, or about the course administration. In an effort to save some trees, there will be no printed handouts. The lecture notes will (usually...) be placed online the day before the class. All necessary information can be obtained online.

syllabus & slides

Schedule The lecture slides for each class can be accessed by clicking on the title. Note that these are being prepared 'on the fly' meaning that the page will be updated periodically. week topic lab & homework [solution] 01/17 01/22 Class logistics Computer hardware & introduction to software engineering LAB & HOMEWORK 01 [SOLN] 01/24 01/29 Root finding, ODEs (Euler, Runge Kutta, symplectic), Kepler problem LAB & HOMEWORK 02 [SOLN] 01/31 02/05 PDEs, finite elements, heat equation Introduction to Mathematica [notebook] Mathematica applications [notebook] Poisson equation relaxation method demo Heat equation forward Euler demo LAB & HOMEWORK 03 [SOLN] 02/07 02/12 Chaos (Lyapunov exponents, logistic map, Duffing equation) & Fractals Chaos and fractals with Mathematica [notebook] LAB & HOMEWORK 04 [SOLN] 02/14 02/19 Numerical integration methods, random number generators Random number generators (code) LAB & HOMEWORK 05 [SOLN] 02/21 02/26 Random walks, phase transitions in percolation, Monte Carlo integration (simple & importance sampling, Markov chains) LAB & HOMEWORK 06 [SOLN] 02/28 03/19 Simple Monte Carlo methods in statistical physics (Ising model, phase transitions, finite-size scaling) [NOTE: special class on TAMU's HPC facilities on 03/07 (3:00 - 5:00 PM) in MPHYS 107] LAB & HOMEWORK 07 [SOLN] 03/21 03/26 Advanced Monte Carlo methods (cluster algorithms, parallel tempering, Wang Landau sampling) LAB & HOMEWORK 08 [SOLN] 03/28 04/02 Optimization & complexity (annealing, genetic, extremal, quantum annealing algorithms) LAB & HOMEWORK 09 [SOLN] 04/04 04/09 Quantum one-body problem (Numerov, shooting, matrix methods) Quantum one-body problems with Mathematica [notebook] LAB & HOMEWORK 10 [SOLN] 04/11 04/16 HPC clusters, basic parallelization (OpenMP, MPI), cellular automata LAB & HOMEWORK 11 [SOLN] 04/18 04/23 Statistical data analysis, (fast) Fourier transforms LAB & HOMEWORK 12 [SOLN] 04/25 Stochastic ODEs (no homework)   04/30 Pointers on how to give a scientific presentation Example 10-minute talk (low-resolution images)   04/30 Final course presentations (time and location TBD)   Please make sure to submit your code (source) as well as homework write-up electronically each week. The homework files are published each week on the day of the lab and due one week later. There will be NO extensions. If you would like to access the lectures slides (PDF) please send an email to the instructor and you might receive the username and password. Students can find the username and password on the slides in the first class. All material on this website is copyrighted by H. G. Katzgraber. No material shall be used for commercial purposes (e.g., A+ Tutoring and similar) without prior written consent from the owner of the material. Failure to do so will result in legal prosecution.

semester projects

The LaTeX macro for the report can be found HERE.

Self-avoiding random walks in d = 1...4 (Eames Bennett, Amin Barzegar) Study the traveling salemesman problem with genetic algorithms (Eunkyoung Shin; Chris Pattison) Avalanches in the BTW sand-pile model and RF Ising model (Stefania Dede; Amin Barzegar) Heat transfer and electric potentials on nontrivial topologies or in parallel (Chris Pattison) Viscous fluid dynamics simulations (Yanli Shi; Chris Pattison) Percolation and networks (Chao Fang) Fractals on GPUs (Chris Pattison) Machine learning the Ising transition (Xingchen Zhao; Chao Fang) Wang-Landau simulation of the Ising and random-field model (Dilina Perera) Population annealing of the (random-field) Ising model in parallel (Elham Azadbakht; Chris Pattison) Minimum vertex covers (Chao Fang) 2D Ising/SG model with different cluster algorithms; critical parameters (Masfer Alkahtani; Chao Fang) 2D q-state Potts model via Wang Landau (Dilina Perera) Variational QMC to find ground states of simple molecules (Dilina Perera) Exact diagonalization of the 1D Hubbard model (Emily Conant; Amin Barzegar) Hysteretic optimization for Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model (Helmut Katzgraber) Monte Carlo simulation of the 3D Heisenberg model (Aysan Bahari; Dilina Perera)

legal

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Policy Statement: The Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) is a federal antidiscrimination statute that provides comprehensive civil rights protection for persons with disabilities. Among other things, this legislation requires that all students with disabilities be guaranteed a learning environment that provides for reasonable accommodation of their disabilities. If you believe you have a disability requiring an accommodation, please contact the Department of Student Life, Services for Students with Disabilities in Room B118 of Cain Hall or call 845-1637.

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