Computation In Modern Physics (Third Edition)

Book excerpt: This textbook is suitable for two courses in computational physics. The first is at an advanced introductory level and is appropriate for seniors or first year graduate students. The student is introduced to integral and differential techniques, Monte Carlo integration, basic computer architecture, linear algebra, finite element techniques, digital signal processing and chaos. In this first part of the book, no knowledge of quantum mechanics is assumed. The third edition has expanded treatments of the subjects in each of the first nine chapters and a new section on modern parallel computing, in particular, Beowulf clusters.The second course (the last four chapters) deals with problems in the strong interaction using quantum mechanical techniques, with emphasis on solutions of many-body scattering problems and several-body bound state calculations with Monte Carlo techniques. It also contains a chapter dealing with the numerical summation of divergent series.