COSMOS CLUSTER 1, SUMMER 2016
COMPUTATIONAL QUANTUM PHYSICS

INSTRUCTORS: Richard Scalettar, Shirley Chiang, Gary Slizeski

GENERAL DESCRIPTION:
The laws that govern the motion of small objects, for example electrons in a solid, are fundamentally different from the familiar laws that Newton discovered. Not only are they different, but they are often counterintuitive. One cannot know the precise location of objects! Certain configurations are forbidden- a spinning molecule can have some angular orientations but not others! Only restricted sets of energy levels are allowed. To understand modern electronics we need to master these unfamiliar and strange laws and their consequences. This is the goal of our cluster. There are some technical things we need to learn along the way: the linux operating system of the computers we will be using and how to write programs in C. We won't assume students know too much about these things, so we'll do a lot of simple, but interesting warm-up programs before tackling our quantum physics projects.


COURSE SCHEDULE:
Where should I be?

WRITING AND COMMUNICATION ACTIVITIES
Learning how science and research are presented.

COMPUTING GUIDES:
The vi editor
The linux operating system
Introduction to xmgrace

NOTES
Cluster Organization
Computers
Logging in and linux beginnings
Editing and hello.c
Compiling C programming- hello.c and add.c
C programming- quadratic.c
C programming- intersect.c
C programming- Arithmetic Series
C programming- Storing Numbers, Base 2
C programming- Geometric Series
C programming- Factorials
C programming- Exponentials from polynomials
C programming- sine function from polynomial
C programming- Writing to a file
C programming- do-while loops
C programming- integer arithmetic; the modulo function
C programming- root finding by bisection
C programming- a random number generator
C programming- two more random number generators
C programming- moments of random numbers
C programming- Checking random number generator visually
C programming- a first random walk

2016 MOVIES!!!
Toby shows how a wave function spreads while it moves.
Mulan hits the wall (at 8000).
Tanner hits the wall (at 8000) in slow motion.
Grace hits the wall (at 8000) harder.
And Kimberly even harder. (Watch closely to see the slight twitch when the barrier is traversed.)
Jessica hits a wider wall (at 8000).
Stephen hits a higher wall (at 4000). Two reflected pulses?
Kajetan hits a low, narrow wall.
Ivy collides a fast (high energy) particle with several barriers, and watches it rattle around in box.
Stanley splits a particle in two.
Helen's double trouble (two barriers at 60 and 80).
Carolyn's small double trouble (two lower barriers at 60 and 80).
Hrishika with high barriers at 40 and 80.
Ethan's variant.
Cody's fight between fast particle and high barrier.
Kaushik Triple Trouble. Barriers at 20, 80, 140
Kate does five barriers. Barriers at 20, 40, 60, 80, 100. (This is starting to look like a quantum heterostructure".)
Amitav and the ramp (and more).

BONUS 2016 MOVIES!!!
Ivy's particle gets stuck in the barrier.
Helen's movie of our first experiment: a QM particle with no barrier widens as it moves.
Kajetan shows no barrier experiment with particle of higher energy (it spreads less than Helen's).
Helen finds a problem with my code (we still need to figure it out). Particle should not be completely reflected.
Jessica collides with a well (negative potential).
Jessica hits a ramped-up wall.
Cody's wave function gets the jitters. (I am not sure what's going on...)

SOME EXTRA PROGRAMMING TASKS AND NOTES:
Modulo, even/odd, primes and NIM
The Fibonacci Numbers
CHAOS!
Collatz Conjecture
Distance Between a Point and a Line
Molecular Dynamics: Oscillations
Molecular Dynamics: Satellite Motion
Gambler's Ruin
The Locker Problem

QUANTUM PHYSICS LECTURES AND READING:
Three lectures by Hans Bethe (my sister's namesake!)
Letter from Bethe to Sommerfeld on why he wanted to stay in the US after WWII
Wikipedia's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics
Quantum Mechanics Made Easy
The Earth as a computer
Extra solar planets (background for 3-body Kepler challenge)