Elke Pahl
I originally studied chemistry in Heidelberg, Germany gaining a PhD in Theoretical Chemistry. My extended postdoc time was spent in the US, back in Germany (Dresden) and then at Massey University Albany, transitioning more and more into physics while also taking care of and time off for the education of my children. I am now a Senior Lecturer in physics at the University of Auckland. My research lies in computational modelling from more fundamental topics like melting of matter in extreme conditions or exploring ground and excited states of quantum phases to more applied modelling of percolating carbon-elastomer composites.
Session
Our package implements the parallel-tempering Monte Carlo method to study the thermodynamics of physical systems. Several copies of the system at different temperatures, randomly initialized, are evolved in parallel and allowed to exchange information of their current state. We make extensive use of Julia’s dynamic type system and multiple dispatch to unify implementations for different ensembles, interaction potentials and boundary conditions; multi-threading is used for parallelization.