Graduate Student Seminar: Coarse-Graining of statistical fields and molecular systems, Speaker: Linfeng Zhang

Graduate Student Seminars
  • Linfeng Zhang
  • Coarse-Graining of statistical fields and molecular systems
Apr 17, 2018
12:30 pm
Fine Hall 214

Title: Coarse-Graining of statistical fields and molecular systems 

Abstract: One of the greatest successes of modern physics has been the development of a systematic framework of doing coarse-graining (CG) at different scales. In this seminar, I will introduce some basic ideas, from a computational aspect, of doing CG on two classes of simple examples: 1) the Ising/XY model, and 2) the liquid water/peptide model. The first example amounts to a real-space renormalization group (RG) map; the second example is of wide interests in modeling biological systems  Two challenges will be specially addressed: 1) representation and optimization of the interaction of CG variables; 2) sampling issues caused by the critical slowing down or a rugged energy landscape.