Charged particles constrained to a curved surface

TL;DR

This paper explores the behavior of charged particles on curved surfaces, utilizing parallel computing and graphics libraries to enhance simulation efficiency and visualization, aimed at educational purposes.

Contribution

It introduces a method combining CUDA and OpenGL for simulating and visualizing charged particles on arbitrary curved surfaces, facilitating learning and research.

Findings

Efficient computation of Coulomb interactions on curved surfaces.

Visualization of particle dynamics using OpenGL.

Educational framework for graduate students.

Abstract

We study the motion of charged particles constrained to arbitrary two-dimensional curved surfaces but interacting in three-dimensional space via the Coulomb potential. To speed-up the interaction calculations, we use the parallel compute capability of the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) of todays graphics boards. The particles and the curved surfaces are shown using the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL). The paper is intended to give graduate students, who have basic experiences with electrostatics and differential geometry, a deeper understanding in charged particle interactions and a short introduction how to handle a many particle system using parallel computing on a single home computer