Computational physics

Specifically, a course on computational physics which I am taking this semester. Sorry if you were expecting something different or something broader! Either way, given that I have a course viva tomorrow for which I need to clean up my codes and get together my results, I thought that I'd talk about it today. As part of the course so far, we've simulated classical (say rutherford scattering) and quantum scattering, learnt the verlet and velocity verlet algorithms to simulate molecular dynamics, learnt the metropolis-hastings sampling method to implement markov chain monte carlo techniques to simulate said molecular systems. Coming to an end, we're learning the entropic sampling method to implement monte carlo and using said method to measure the free energy of systems. And eventually, we will be taught parallel programming as well but as I've written before, it's pretty easy to do parallel processing in python so I implemented a rudimentary version. You can check all of the codes here, using the online nbviewer.

I always heard about monte carlo techniques and I've wanted to learn it for a while now. One thing I've come to realize over these 3 months is that I learn best when someone introduces me to the topic, instead of me having to learn the ropes all on my own. I've had to pick up python this way and I now feel that it would've been much faster had I used it as part of a course with people I could've bugged for doubts. Also, it's dawning on my that almost everyone in grad school writes code (duh! it took me so long? STUPID!) and that if i wanted to be better at it than the rest, I needed to do more courses, learn more techniques and practice more. Well, I intend to do a couple more computational courses next semester so with a good amount of practice, I might be able to say that I'm a bit better than the rest, at computational physics. Hey, I have to be better at something! I wouldn't be able to live with myself otherwise! :D

PS - I should start noting down the time it takes for me to write one of these blog posts. It might be interesting to see trends like how long it takes for me to write an article against it's length and if the time it takes for me to write an article increases or decreases with time. Interesting...

Popular posts from this blog

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these
Read more

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)
Read more