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Show HN: 2D Coulomb Gas Simulator
by swesnow
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 I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of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.
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
Awesome! Beautiful work. Mesmerizing, even
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.
Yes, the web page persists through reboots.
You have to painfully force quit Safari by going through the motions of the gestures, wait for the phone to respond, and then quit Safari from the card task switcher.
Quick submit a level 10 CVE DOS vuln!
Crafted by Rajat
Source Code