COSMOS CLUSTER 1, SUMMER 2019
COMPUTATIONAL QUANTUM PHYSICS

INSTRUCTORS: Richard Scalettar, Shirley Chiang, Gary Slizeski

MORE INSTRUCTORS: Owen Bradley, Yuxi Zhang, Alexander LeBeau

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

2019 STUDENT MOVIES
Nika is confined
Nika hits the wall
Justin sees an internal bound state
Justin goes negative
Justin goes very negative
Kate sees standing waves
Kate measures quantum speeds
Kate's electron disappears off the screen

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
Karen Lei's Non Calculus derivation of binomial sums

MICHAEL NAUENBERG'S AMAZING MULTIPLE PLANET ORBITS!
Figure 8 orbit with three masses.
Criss-cross orbit with three masses.

QUANTUM PHYSICS LECTURES AND READING:
Quantum 1D simulation applet developed for a
quantum chemistry course at Harvard
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)

FILES TO DOWNLOAD FOR MOVIE MAKING
renamer1
renamer2
renamer3
renamer4
concatenater1
concatenater2
concatenater3
concatenater4
separate.f
ampersand.tex
test movie