The Lectures

These are Adobe Acrobat PDF files generated from Powerpoint presentations I gave at a short course in Quantum Monte Carlo methods in Firenze, Italy, in the summer of 2001. Most of these are about 1 MB in size.

Lecture 1: Stochastic integration
Lecture 2: Random numbers
Lecture 3: Classical spin models
Lecture 4: Cluster algorithms for classical models
Lecture 5: Quantum spin models
Lecture 6: The continuum limit
Lecture 7: Observables and estimators
Lecture 8: Finite-Size Scaling
Lecture 9: More about the correlation length
Lecture 10: Survey of other applications

Also, these lectures used a variety of graphical demos to illustrate the concepts of Monte Carlo methods and cluster algorithms. If you have a PC running Windows, you can download, unzip, and execute the following programs.

Buffon.exe: Buffon's dartboard
BasicMC.exe: Monte Carlo on a Gaussian
RandCorr.exe: Correlations in Random Number Sequences
2dSpin.exe: 2d Classical Spin Models
1dAFHM.exe: 1d Quantum Heisenberg Model

It is recommended that these programs be unzipped into separate empty directories. Note these programs use Visual Basic 4.0, so you will need to have the VB4 runtime library VB40032.DLL in your system directory. You can get this from the Microsoft web site if you need it.

Back to BBB Home Page