[LA-SiGMA] Spring Courses

[Bety Rodriguez-Milla]

Dear All,

The following four courses will be offered this spring taught by LA-SiGMA faculty and collaborators. Students and faculty at other locations will participate using videoconference rooms. 

Please pass on this information to your students or anybody else who could be interested in taking these courses. Students should contact the listed instructor directly.

Regards,

-Bety


* Many Body Theory focuses on advanced many-body techniques in material science, and is taught by Mark Jarrell (LSU). If students were interested, the first month of the course will be dedicated to discuss advanced statistical mechanics, including the physics of phase transitions (scale invariance near the critical point, scaling, renormalization group, etc). The rest of the course would be focused in many body theory either using a conventional approach (Gellman-Low, Wick's theory) or a path-integral based approach. Non-equilibrium Green function formalism, the  Keldysh formalism, or even the Wagner 
formalism could be also discussed. In addition, several many-body numerical methods are derived and used in class projects, including Dynamical Mean Field Approximation, Dynamical Cluster Approximation and renormalization group. A basic course in Condensed Matter/Solid State Physics (Ashcroft/Mermin) is a suggested pre-requisite for this course. Classes begin January 14th and end May 4th meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays 9:00-10:20. 
For additional information, please, contact Mark Jarrell at "jarrellphysics at gmail.com".


* Computational Physics is a three-credit graduate course. It is taught by Karen Tomko (Ohio Supercomputer Center) and Juana Moreno (Louisiana State University). It focuses on high performance computing (HPC) and the techniques used in designing and implementing computationally intensive applications on HPC systems. High performance systems including traditional parallel supercomputers, Linux clusters, and heterogeneous computing (such as GPUs and MIC) will be discussed. The course will focus on parallelization and memory access optimization for computationally intensive applications in science and engineering. Classes begin January 14th and end May 4th meeting on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays 8:30-9:20. 
For additional information, please, contact Juana Moreno at "moreno at lsu.edu".


* Condensed Matter Theory is a graduate level course taught by Ilya Vekhter (Louisiana State University). The course will focus on the description of the ordered states in condensed matter systems, especially on magnetism of insulators and metals, and on superconductivity. We will combine the phenomenological description via Ginzburg-Landau expansion of the free energy with the mean-field treatment of simple interacting models to discuss the conditions for the appearance of the ordered phases, their competition and coexistence, and the nature of elementary excitations. Throughout the course we will be comparing the results obtained using our treatment with experimental data, emphasizing successes and discussing open questions. Pre-requisites: knowledge of basics of solid state physics (crystal lattices, Bloch's theorem, energy bands, transport), elementary statistical physics (partition functions for bosons and fermions, free energies, expectation values), and quantum mechanics. Classes begin January 14th and end May 4th meeting on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:30-11:50. 
For additional information, please, contact Ilya Vekhter at "vekhter at lsu.edu".


* Molecular Dynamics, a three-credit graduate course, will be taught by a team of faculty including Tom Bishop and Collin Wick (Louisiana Tech), Michal Brylinski and Dorel Moldovan (LSU), and Steve Rick (Univ. of New Orleans). The course is an introduction to mastering the art of molecular modeling and dynamics simulations with an emphasis on high performance computing and modeling biomolecular systems. It will be team taught and meet once a week for video lectures. Each student will conduct a molecular simulation project. Students who take this course will learn how to configure a computer cluster (ideally a Little Fe but any two computers and a network switch can be used), install and utilize freely available molecular visualization, analysis and dynamics software tools, construct systems and run simulations on local and remote computing resources. Course work and lectures will cover essential structural biology and theoretical considerations from basic numerical integration techniques (e.g. Verlet algorithm, Ewald summations) to advanced thermodynamic considerations (e.g. replica exchange and free energy calculations).  Projects are designed to explore an important biological application, a proper use of an advanced simulation technique, or performance characterization (e.g. numeric and performance analysis of GPU vs. traditional CPU). The schedule of the class have not been decided yet. If you are interested in registering for this course,  please, contact Thomas Bishop at "bishop at latech.edu".


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Dr. Bety E. Rodriguez-Milla
LONI Institute/LA-SiGMA Scientific Coordinator
Center for Computation & Technology
Louisiana State University
216 Johnston Hall
Baton Rouge, LA 70803 USA
brodrig at cct.lsu.edu