Here is a non-exhaustive list of term paper
topics, and sources of ideas for topics. Should you be
interested in some subject that is not listed here, and you
are not sure whether it is acceptable, simply ask me.
General Subfields of Computational Physics
Choosing one of these topics will often require you to
specialise your focus in order to yield a manageable
paper. I can assist with this as necessary
- Computational Astrophysics
- Computational Biophysics
- Computational Climate Science
- Computational Cosmology (N-body simulations of
structure formation)
- Computational Electromagnetics
- Computational Fluid Dynamics
- Computational Geophysics
- Computational Materials Science
- Computational Plasma Physics
- Computational Quantum Many-Body Physics
- Computational Soft Matter Physics
- Computational Statistical Mechanics
- Lattice Field Theory / Lattice Gauge Theory
- Machine Learning / Deep Learning (with applications to
an area in physics)
- Quantum Computing
- Numerical Weather Prediction
- Numerical Relativity
More Specific Topics and Algorithms
Most of these topics should be coupled with a description
of one or more sample applications, preferably, but not
necessarily, in physics/astrophysics.
- Barnes-Hut Algorithm for N-body calculations
- Density Functional Theory (with computational
applications)
- History of Supercomputing / History of the Top-500
List
- Krylov Subspace Method
- Markov Chain Monte Carlo
- Metropolis Algorithm
- Multigrid Method for Ellptic PDEs
- Fast Fourier Transform
- Fast Multipole Method
- Simplex Method
Sources
- Winners of the Aneesur Rahman Prize for
Computational Physics: The American
Physical Society awards an annual prize for outstanding
achievement in computational physics research.
Information about this prize, including a list of
awardees can be found HERE.
You can choose one scientist who has won the award, and
then write your essay about the work for which the prize
was awarded. This will probably involve a a bit of
sleuthing into the original research, so you should be
prepared for that.
- Winners of the Nicholas Metropolis Award for
Outstanding Doctoral Thesis Work in Computational
Physics: The idea here is the same as for the
Raman prize winners, except now the award is for PhD
work; see HERE
for details. The work will tend to be published in
journals as well as being described in the thesis per
se. Ideally you would refer to the thesis itself
and if you have trouble locating it you can always try
emailing the scientist directly and requesting a
copy!
- American Physical Society (APS) Division of
Computational Physics: Meeting
Presentations
- IUPAP Conference on Computational Physics: Search for
CCP20XX, where XX is 19, 18, ...
- Journals
- Computational Astrophysics and Cosmology
- Computational Materials Science
- Computer Physics Communications
- International Journal of Modern Physics C
- Journal of Computational Physics
- Living Reviews in Computational Astrophysics
- Frontiers in Physics: Computational Physics
- Physical Review E
- SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing
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