Ray Yang
I received my PhD in Physics from New Zealand Institute for Advanced Study in 2022. During my PhD, I worked with Prof. Joachim Brand developing quantum Monte Carlo algorithms for ultracold Bose gases. Later, I joined the Chemistry Department at Washington University in St. Louis as a postdoc, working with Prof. Robert Wexler on nested sampling. My extensive interdisciplinary research experience spans chemistry and physics, with published works on molecular magnetism, metallic clusters and surfaces, as well as ultracold quantum gases. My research interests focus on developing efficient and accurate computational methods for solving complicated quantum and statistical mechanical problems. My main tools are (quantum and classical) Monte Carlo techniques. I am an enthusiastic Julia programmer, I use the programming language to develop several open-source computational physics packages including Rimu.jl and FreeBird.jl.
Session
FreeBird.jl is an extensible platform for computationally studying phase equilibria across a diverse range of interfacial systems, with easy extension to other phenomena. FreeBird.jl employs the concept of walkers—sets of configurations that evolve systematically to sample a desired statistical distribution. We implemented an atomistic and a lattice walker system, and various sampling schemes, such as nested sampling, Wang-Landau sampling, Metropolis Monte Carlo, etc.