Professor - Physics Department
Office: Physics Research Building (PRB), 3 Cummington St., room 551. Telephone: 617-353-9058.
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Professor - Physics Department Office: Physics Research Building (PRB), 3 Cummington St., room 551. Telephone: 617-353-9058. |
Goal of this course is to introduce the students to computational techniques for the solution of research problems in physics. After introductory lectures on the basics of computing, the course proceeds toward modern methods of computational physics. In particular the data parallel paradigm and graphics rendering are illustrated through computationally intensive applications. All of the techniques are presented in the context of specific projects. For some problems, students are asked to play the role of application scientists, working with the computer in an interactive manner to perform a variety of numerical experiments. For other problems, students are required to take an active part in designing the code that will be used for the solution. Emphasis in all cases will be on the importance that the proper formulation of a problem plays for its ultimate computational solution.
Please consult the syllabus for detailed information about lectures, exams, grading and many other metters related to the course.
Lectures will be held on Tuesday and Thursday from 11AM to 12:30PM in the CAS Computing Laboratory, room CAS 327. A discussion session will be held on Friday from 3PM to 4PM, also in room CAS 327.
Lecture notes, software and other materials for the course are distributed through a shared file system, on a server accessible to the students, in the CAS workstation classroom.
A program for the simulation and visualization of the evolution of the quantum mechanical wave-function in one dimension, from the course material, can be downloaded here, as a compressed tar archive.
Please consult the syllabus for detailed information about lectures, exams, grading and many other metters related to the course.
Course textbook: No course textbook is required.
Lecture notes and practice problems are posted on this web site.
Assignments will also posted on this web site.
Goal of this course is to present a theoretically based formulation of classical mechanics at a level that is intermediate between the level of an introductory undergraduate course and the level of a graduate course.
Lecture notes:
Lecture 1: Vectors and matrices.
Review of Newton's laws: see PY251-Lecture 3
Review of kinetic and potential energy: see
PY251-Lecture 4
Review of linear momentum and center of mass: see
PY251-Lecture 5
Lecture 2: The Lagrangian formalism.
Lecture 3: Applications of Lagrange's equations.
Variational techniques.
Code and linux makefile
for the simulation of the double pendulum.
Code for the same problem based on the more
accurate Runge-Kutta algorithm.
Lecture 4: Hamiltonian dynamics.
Lecture 5: The equation of Hamilton-Jacobi and problems of optimization:
part1,
part2.
Notes on the equation of Hamilton Jacobi:
from PY 421.
Lecture 6: Small oscillations.
Lecture 7: Dynamics of rigid bodies.
Lecture 8:
Dynamics of continuous systems.
Course textbook:
Physics for Scientists and Engineers
by Paul Fishbane, Stephen Gasiorowicz, Steve Thornton,
Pearson Prentice Hall, 2005.
Textbook for error analysis in laboratory assignments: Introduction to Error
Analysis by John Taylor, University Science Books, 1997.
This course is calculus based and students taking the course
should have already taken calculus. Students should check their
knowledge of calculus by doing the
Mathematics self-test.
Lecture notes:
Lecture 1
Lecture 2
Lecture 3
Lecture 4
Lecture 5
Lecture 6
Lecture 7
Lecture 8
Lecture 9
Lecture 10
Lecture 11
Lecture 12