Everything about Computational Physics totally explained
Computational physics is the study and implementation of numerical
algorithms in order to solve problems in
physics for which a quantitative theory already exists. It is often regarded as a subdiscipline of
theoretical physics but some consider it an intermediate branch between theoretical and
experimental physics.
Physicists often have a very precise mathematical theory describing how a system will behave. Unfortunately, it's often the case that solving the theory's equations
ab initio in order to produce a useful prediction isn't practical. This is especially true with
quantum mechanics, where only a handful of simple models have complete analytic solutions. In cases where the systems only have numerical solutions, computational methods are used.
Applications of computational physics
Computational methods are widely used in
solid state physics,
fluid mechanics, and
lattice field theory/
lattice gauge theory (especially
lattice quantum chromodynamics), among other areas. Computational solid state physics, for example, uses
density functional theory to calculate properties of solids, a method similar to that used by chemists to study molecules. In solid state physics, the electronic band structure, magnetic properties and charge densities can be calculated by several methods, including the
Luttinger-Kohn k.p method and ab initio methods.
Many other more general numerical problems fall loosely under the domain of computational physics, although they could easily be considered pure
mathematics or part of any number of applied areas. These include
All these methods (and several others) are used to calculate physical properties of the modeled systems. Computational Physics also encompasses the tuning of the software/hardware structure to solve the problems (as the problems usually can be very large, in processing power need or in memory requests).
Further Information
Get more info on 'Computational Physics'.
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