LANS Informal Seminar: Carolyn Phillips

Seminar Title: Constructing one-dimensional topological singularities from a complex scalar field over a mesh
Speaker: Carolyn Phillips, Aneesur Rahman Postdoctoral Fellow, MCS, Argonne National Laboratory

Date/Time: 2014-10-22 15:00
Location: Building 240 Room 4301

Description:
In simulations of superconducting materials using the Ginzburg-Landau equations, a complex scalar field is evolved in time. The amplitude of this field describes the local density of superconducting carriers. For type-II superconductors, one of the most critical features of this field is the vortices, whose dynamics determine the performance of the material. Mathematically, these vortices are one-dimensional topological singularities of the field. Previously, simulations of superconductors have been small-scale, and vortices have been visualized by examining contour plots and isosurfaces of the complex scalar field. However, these methods blur the fine details of the vortices, scale poorly to large-scale simulations, and do not easily enable isolating and tracking individual vortices. I will discuss our algorithm for constructing connected vortex objects from a complex scalar field defined over a structured Cartesian finite-difference discretization mesh. With this method, the vortices can be easily described at a resolution even finer than the mesh itself. The precise determination of the vortex cores allows the interplay of the vortices inside a model superconductor to be visualized in higher resolution than has previously been possible. This feature extraction method also massively reduces the data footprint of the simulations and provides the data structures for further analysis and feature tracking. This method can also be easily extended to an unstructured mesh.