Computational Physics at

Syracuse University

Opening for a postdoctoral research associate

* Overview * Faculty * Simulation Image Gallery

Overview

The interdiciplinary area of computational science, which bridges the gap between physics and computer science, is dramatically growing, and here at Syracuse University, we are contributing extensively to this process. Computational approaches to physical problems have existed for some time; the rapidly increasing power of computers and growing sophistication of computational techniques have made these approaches much more important and exciting recently. The physics department itself has a variety of workstations, including a general-use cluster of Pentium-based Linux workstations and a 102 processor computational cluster, `Weasel'.

Faculty

Mark Bowick is active in combining analytical and numerical approaches to the understanding of random surfaces. Random surfaces appear in a wide variety of physical settings including gauge theories, string theory, quantum gravity, condensed matter physics and biological membranes. Their understanding involves the interplay of geometry, statistical mechanics and field theory.

Simon Catterall conducts large scale simulations of models of quantum gravity. This research integrates ideas from quantum field theory, statistical mechanics, and advanced computational science (Monte Carlo techniques and parallel algorithms in particular.) Catterall has developed novel methods for the computational study of the fluctuations of the geometry of space-time and the interaction of these fluctuations with matter fields. Simon has more recently been investigating lattice formulations of supersymmetric field theories. These models are thought to be important for describing possible new physics at very high energies. The simulation of these theories poses new challenges as they contain non-local effective interactions.

Cristina Marchetti, a solid state theorist, simulates the flow of flux lines in superconductors and nonequilibrium phase transitions in driven disordered systems. Such numerical simulations turn out to be invaluable for understanding materials, where disorder plays an important role.

Alan Middleton is a computational physicist who simulates the behavior of condensed-matter systems. Middleton's interests focus on how methods from computer science can answer questions about the statistical mechanics of complex systems, such as lines of flux in superconductors and electrons in extremely small electronic devices. Such questions are often naturally phrased in terms of combinatorial optimization problems and counting problems on lattices. Recent progress by computer scientists on algorithms on these problems allows for the rapid solution of the equivalent physics problem in many cases. In general, Middleton studies how the formulation of problems for solution on the computer is related to our theoretical understanding of the physical problem.

Rafael Sorkin uses computers in his work on causal sets. He and his students are simulating both the growth of the causal set itself and the dynamics of a scalar field on a background causal set in order to develop the theory further. The computer languages used include C, Fortran and Lisp (for which Sorkin has written a suite of interactive poset functions).

Syracuse University Physics Department Research
Last Modified February 21, 2002, but needs some updating