Computational physics

From Free net encyclopedia

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 regard it as an intermediate branch of physics between theoretical and experimental.

Physicists often have a very precise mathematical theory describing how a system will behave. Unfortunately, it is often the case that solving the theory's equations ab-initio in order to produce a useful prediction is not realistic. This is especially true with quantum mechanics, where only a handful of simple models can be solved exactly. This is where the computational physicist steps in.

Applications of computational physics

Computational methods are widely used in solid state physics, fluid mechanics and lattice quantum chromodynamics among other areas. Computational physics borrows a number of ideas from computational chemistry - for example, the density functional theory used by computational physicists to calculate properties of solids is basically the same as that used by chemists to calculate the properties of molecules.

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. For example:

• Solving differential equations
• Evaluating integrals
• Stochastic methods, specifically the Monte Carlo method
• Specialised partial differential equation methods, for example the finite difference method and the finite element method
• The matrix eigenvalue problem – i.e. the problem of finding eigenvalues of very large matrices.
• The pseudo-spectral method

See also

• Molecular Dynamics
• Computational fluid dynamics
• Important publications in computational physics

External links

• Computational Physics argues that this area of research should be regarded as different both from theoretical and from experimental physics.ar:فيزياء حاسوبية

de:Computerphysik ko:계산물리학 ja:計算物理学 pl:Fizyka komputerowa pt:Física Computacional zh:计算物理学