Exploiting algorithm and hardware improvements to solve the ultracold few-body problem

Kansas State University, Manhattan KS

Investigators

Abstract

Significant theoretical progress has been made in recent years on the problem of three neutral atoms colliding at ultracold temperatures. Much of that progress has relied on computational physics, and there is now a unique opportunity to substantially advance the computational solution of the ultracold few-body problem. This opportunity comes from an unlikely source: computer video gamers. The computational power that has been built into computer video cards to drive games is enormous, promising orders of magnitude improvement over computing on typical workstations. Moreover, recent developments have made it much easier for the high performance computing community to tap into this power, and that is what is proposed here. At the same time, several improvements are proposed to both the underlying representation of the problem and the numerical algorithms employed. Taken together, this three-pronged attack on the problem can be expected to render currently intractable problems in ultracold few-body physics tractable. In turn, these advances in computational physics can be expected to further our theoretical understanding of these problems.