Fifth Year
This (2005) is the final year of my honours physics degree at UBC. I'm mopping up all the courses that are required for me to graduate: some hard ones, like statistical mechanics and my undergraduate thesis, and some easy ones, like Classical Mechanics 206 because the administration won't accept UCFV Mechanics 222 as credit, even though it did include a classical mechanics component.
I took the Physics GRE this year, quite an disagreeable proposition. Luckily, I copied the practice exam off the ETS site before they changed it, something which happens once every millenium, apparently. Two practice exams are twice as good as one, so share in the bounty of the green and purple practice books! I hope I never have to take a standardized test again.
Numerical Plasma Simulations
For my undergraduate thesis course (PHYS 449), I wrote two simulations of a one-dimensional plasma. My supervisor was Matt Choptuik, the head of the UBC Numerical Relativity Group, who helped with the computational part of the project and also provided access to the the UBC clusters. I was originally going to put the plasma around a black-hole, but that turned out to be too ambitious a project. One program ran a particle-mesh simulation, while the other ran a finite-difference approximation. I compared the quality of their results (FDAs are better) and observed the plasma behaviour. I learned a little bit about Landau damping and a little bit more about programming. Here are links to the final product, as well as some intermediate notes.
|
Aaron Froese
