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Show HN: 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator (simonhalvdansson.github.io)

44 points by swesnow ↗ HN
A pretty simple but fun to play with simulator for a concept from mathematical physics called the "2D Coulomb gas". I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of WebGPU acceleration (ported with liberal help from Codex to get through all of the boilerplate).

Play around with it - hopefully read up more on the 2D Coulomb gas because it is an incredibly deep topic research wise.

5 comments

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bizzyskillet
Awesome! Beautiful work. Mesmerizing, even
swesnow
Thanks I agree it is mesmerizing!
zeitgeistcowboy
Warning: if you increase the steps per frame it will break your phone. At least with my iPhone and Safari it stalls the entire phone.
swesnow
True, you'd think Safari wouldn't let websites go so crazy with WebGPU :)
gus_massa
Note 1: I had to go to the middle and reduce the number of particles to 1000 to be able to run it in my phone.

Note 2: In this case, 2D means that the force is proportional to distance^-1 instead of the usual distance^-2. It's not a 3D word projected into a plane, it's a real 2D word that lives inside a plane. It would be nice to have an option to switch and compare. I have no intuition about the difference.

Note 3: Somewhere in the middle, it's possible to switch the external potencial from z^2 to z^4 to z^20, where z is the distance from the center.

z^2 "Ginibre" is a nice round surface, like a wok. Electrons get evenly distributed.

z^20 "Mittag-Leffler lambda=10" is flat in the center and then goes up quickly, like a saucepan. Electrons escape from each other, a few of them remain in the center but most get squashed against the circular wall.

z^4 "Mittag-Leffler lambda=2" Something in between