PHYS-4007/5007 Course Project Web Home Page

Your Computer Class Project will involve writing or modifying a computer code dealing with some aspect of physics using any of one the following areas in computational physics: matrix solution of a set of linear equations (say with Gaussian elimination), solution of a set of ordinary differential equations (using either the 4th-order Runge-Kutta technique or the Adams method), solution of a partial differential equation (with the dependent variable being a function of at least two independent variables, e.,g., solution to Schrodinger's equation), or fitting a set of data to a linear relation using the method of least squares. Note that if you have some other type of calculation that you wish to perform for this project, ask me for approval before writing your proposal. Note that this proposal will be your second homework assignment -- you will get a separate assignment sheet with the details of how this proposal should be structured.

You are free to use any of the following programming languages: IDL, Fortran, Python (either version 2.7 or 3), or C. You are also allowed to use C++ if you like, but note that I will not be able to help you if you have troubles getting your program to work. Also note that you are not allowed to use programming languages like Mathematica, Maple, or MatLab. You are allowed to use any math functions the programming language supplies (either internally or in a library). Note that I will supply Runge-Kutta and Adams method subroutines (written in Fortran 77) on this project web page to solve systems of ordinary differential equations. Typically when doing such a computer research project, the amount of time needed to complete a given aspect of the project is: 50% for code development, 20% for debugging the code, 20% to analyze the results, and 10% to write the manuscript.

You will then analyze and present your results. The analysis should be done via software you write (in some sort of graphics software like IDL). Besides writing an 8 to 10 page manuscript on the results of this work, you also will be required to write a proposal to do this work for the second homework assignment. In this proposal, you need to state what problem you are taking on, how you will approach the solution, the operating system and machine type you plan on using, the programming language you plan to use, and what questions you plan on answering with this project.

Those of you taking this course for honors or graduate credit must carry out the additional material in the project descriptions, or propose to do a project that is at a graduate level (and I will decide what is graduate level). Also, your research paper will need to be 10 to 15 ages in length.

Codes should be able output data into ASCII files which can be examined by your professor and used for your analysis. The best way to display the results of your code is through a graphical plots. You will need to do this both to the terminal (i.e., screen) and to a hardcopy plot such as an encapsulated postscript file (which you can then include in your final manuscript). Besides turning in the final report, you will also be required to turn in at least one of these output files and a listing of the code itself by emailing me these items at my ETSU email address. When writing your final manuscripts, you must use the LaTeX markup language.

IMPORTANT NOTE: Due to OIT's paranoia about security issues, files ending in either ".dat" (standard Unix data files) and ".pro" (IDL procedure and function files) will not show up on a web browser even though those these files exist on the web server disk. To counteract this, I have changed the name of all ".dat" files to ".txt" files and renamed all of the IDL procedures for you to download to ".txt" file names. Note that after you download a given IDL procedure or function file from this web site to your IDL working directory on your PC, immediately rename it to its ".pro" name as shown on web page link. For instance, when you click on "sampleplot.pro", this will save this file to your IDL working directory as "sampleplot.txt". Once on your home machine, rename it to "sampleplot.pro" from a terminal window or directory GUI interface.

Also note that some web browsers will just display a text (ASCII) file in the browser itself, instead of downloading it. In those cases, just open up an empty file with text editting software (like emacs or Notepad) and clip an paste the text from the browser to your file. Then save it to a filename by the same name as indicated on the web page.

A sample LaTeX file (template.tex) can be downloaded and used as a template for your project's manuscript. This LaTeX file requires the temptex.eps figure file which can be downloaded too. The template.pdf file contain the compiled version of this LaTeX file. Download the following files to a subdirectory where you wish to carry out this project (i.e. the so-called working directory). Click on each of the files listed.

The files below are needed to assist you in carrying out the Data Fitting to Hubble's Law project. There are links that contain spectra of a set of galaxies (in ASCII format with files ending in ".txt"), a bare-bones IDL procedure that you can use as a starting point, some supplemental IDL procedures, the spectral data files, and a reference paper concerning the spectra contained in the data files. For this project, you will be determining Hubble's Constant, H_o, which is used in Hubble's Law:

where d is the distance measured in parsecs and p is the parallax angle measured in arcseconds (though you will not need this parallax equation for this project).

The NASA SkyLab mission had a solar telescope on board that took many high-resolution images of the Sun at X-ray wavelengths. One of the most important findings of SkyLab was that the solar corona is composed of numerous magnetic loop-like structures that can last from days to weeks in a relatively static state. As such, these structures have been come to known as quasi-static solar coronal loops (SCL). The following are research papers published and unpublished about the physics of carrying out numerical modeling of solar coronal loops.

The following are useful Fortran 77 files for modeling solar coronal loops. Feel free to make use of any of these for your project.

This web page contains the links of the various IDL procedure files that students in PHYS-4007/5007 will need to help them carry out their course project. The files here are in standard ASCII (text) format so that when you click on the link, the code will appear in your web browser. Once the code appears on the web browser, highlight all the lines of code, then copy and paste them into an ASCII editor (either Notepad, Emacs, or the IDL GUI editor). Once pasted, save this file as indicated by the PROCEDURE name (e.g., polytrope.pro).

The remaining suggested projects listed above do not have helpful code files that I have written for student use. Should a student choose one of these project topics, they will have to develope thyat coding from scratch. Good luck with your modeling!