Christopher E. Coleman-Smith, Entered 2008/09
Office Location: 248
Email Address: cec24@phy.duke.edu
Specialties:
Theoretical nuclear physics
Nonlinear dynamics and complex systems
Education:
MPhys Physics with Theory, The University of Manchester, UK, 2005
Research Categories: statistical modelling, dynamical systems,
Research Description: I am currently working on applying techniques from statistics to emulate computationally expensive simulations.
State of the art hydrodynamic and transport codes take a long time to run. Through careful choice of initial conditions and analysis of the associated output data it is possible to generate a reasonable approximation of the model for points within the state-space which have not been explicitly evaluated.
The resulting emulator allows rapid estimation of values of the output for points which have not been explicitly calculated by the code.Furthermore the emulator provides a method to develop rigorous tolerance bounds for the computational model which will facilitate comparison with experimental/field data and as such provide a means to validate the computational code itself.
A recent talk I gave on this subject is available here. My C implementation of these ideas is available under an MIT license from github.
I am also begining an investigation of colour brehmsstrahhlung and the LPM (Landau-Pomeranchuck-Migdal) effect. Here a quark enters a color-field and as a consequence of the resulting scatterings the quark emits a gluon which itself is scattered by the color-field. These many scatterings lead to phase shifts in the gluon wavefunction which can result in destructive interference, this is the LPM effect. The electronic analog of this effect can be directly observed by examining photon emission spectra produced from electron scattering in targets. However by it's very nature, single quarks and gluons are rather difficult to observe, the QCD versoin is still elusive.
Areas of Interest:
computational/numerical physics
neurobiology, the role of network structure in brain function
n-body simulation methods and applications
classical mechanics, hamiltonian chaos
orbital/capture dynamics, celestial mechanics