Aurel Bulgac

                                                    Professor

                                                    Fellow of the American Physical Society, APS Outstanding Referee
                                                                                  

                                                                                             Nuclear Theory Group
                                                                                             Department of Physics
                                                                                             University of Washington
                                                                                             P.O. Box 351560
                                                                                             Seattle, WA 98195-1560, USA                             

       TALKS

       MEDIA

       COLLABORATORS

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0556-4107

RESEARCH 

Vortex Rings 2  - online supplementary material for G. Wlazłowski, A. Bulgac, M.M. Forbes, and K.J. Roche,  Life Cycle of Superfluid Vortices in the Unitary Fermi Gas,  Phys. Rev. A 91, 031602(R) (2015).

Nuclear Energy Density Functional - online material for A. Bulgac, M.M. Forbes, and S. Jin,  arXiv:1506.09195

Induced Fission of 240Pu within a Real-Time Microscopic Framework - online material for A. Bulgac, P. Magierski, K.J. Roche, and I. Stetcu,   Phys. Rev. Lett. 116, 122504 (2016), arXiv:1511.00738, Editor's Choice and Featured in Physics

Vortex pinning and dynamics in the neutron star crust - online material for G. Wlazłowski, K. Sekizawa, P. Magierski, A. Bulgac, and M.M. Forbes, , arXiv:1606.04847

Numerical Programs

Here I shall add from time to time various relatively small numerical programs I have written and which others might find useful. Please do not count on any help of any kind on my part, apart from the comments in the write-up, you will have to figure out everything if you want to use it, how to use it and all the rest. However, if you use it, please let me know about that and include the corresponding acknowledgment  in the relevant documents.

• Here is an implementation of SLDA using the Bessel-DVR and the Broyden algorithm for updating the fields and the chemical potentials,  used for determining the properties of a trapped two-component Fermi gas with an arbitrary total pseudo-spin.  The slda_broyden__bessel program was written in matlab. Here is a python code, written by M.M. Forbes, solving the same problem by varying the effective mass.  For theory see: A. Bulgac,  Local Density Functional Theory for Superfluid Fermionic Systems: The Unitary Gas, Phys. Rev. A 76 040502(R) (2007)

• Four matlab codes implementing the Lanczos algorithm and the imaginary time evolution for determining the ground state wave functions  (and excited states as well in case of Lanczos) of a triton and alpha particles with central forces only using Jacobi coordinates and which can be run on a laptop. For theory see: A. Bulgac and M.M. Forbes, On the Use of the Discrete Variable Representation Basis in Nuclear Physics, Phys. Rev. C 87,  051301(R)  (2013)

• The LISE package aimed at simulating time-dependent 3D nuclear systems, the numerical implementation of the (TD)SLDA description and code download are available.

• The W-SLDA Toolkit aimed at simulating time-dependent 3D strongly interacting cold fermionic atom systems, the numerical implementation of the (TD)SLDA description and code are available here.
  

      
                                              On teaching mathematics, V.I. Arnold
                                Alternate link
                                              These are the words of a very wise mathematician, worth reading especially by every aspiring theoretical physicist. 
                                            

                                              How to become a GOOD Theoretical Physicist by Gerard 't Hooft
                                              
                                               Vladimir Gribov (BH)
                                          (That was my graduate school. I was the speaker at one of those seminars,
                                           which started in the late morning, no lunch break, and ended in late afternoon.
                                           Only after my work was dissected to the bone, and BH was one of the main debaters,
                                           I was allowed to officially defend my thesis.)

                                               Scientific Method: Defend the integrity of physics by G. Ellis and J. Silk

Gravitational Waves Detected    -   Physics Review Letters, 116, 061102 (2016)

From: All the world's a lab...then the assistant professor, Sydney Brenner, Vol. 4, Issue 6 (1994)

I attribute essentially all my success to the very large amount of chocolate that I consume… Personally I feel that milk chocolate makes you stupid… Now dark chocolate is the way to go. It’s one thing if you want like a medicine or chemistry Nobel Prize, OK, but if you want a physics Nobel Prize it pretty much has got to be dark chocolate. Eric Cornell, University of Colorado, The Chicago Tribune, October 10, 2012.

In Physics, Telling Cranks from Experts Ain't Easy, John Horgan, Scientific American, December 11th, 2011

Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric.   Bertrand Russell

My interest in science is to simply find out about the world. . . . When we go to investigate it,  we shouldn't pre-decide what it is we're trying to do, except to try to find out more about it. . . .  Altogether, I can't believe these special stories that have been made up about our relationship  to the universe at large because they seem to me too simple, too connected, too local, too  provincial. . . . I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more  interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong. 

I wouldn't want my doctor thinking that intelligent design was an equally plausible hypothesis to evolution any  more than I would want my airplane pilot believing in the flat Earth. James Langer  

On a paper submitted by a physicist colleague: This isn't right. This isn't even wrong. Wolfgang Pauli

When you can measure what you are speaking about and express it in numbers,  you know something about it; but when you cannot measure it, when you cannot express it in numbers, your knowledge is of a meager and unsatisfactory kind.  Lord Kelvin

Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened. Winston Churchill

The difference between science and the fuzzy subjects is that science requires reasoning while other subjects merely require scholarship. Robert Heinlein

I'm a strong believer that ignorance is important in science. If you know too much, you start seeing why things won't work. That's why it's important to change your field to collect more ignorance. Sydney Brenner

Never be afraid to try something new. Remember that amateurs built the Ark and professionals built the Titanic. Dave Barry

Jones's First Law: Anyone who makes a significant contribution to any field of endeavor, and stays in that field long enough, becomes an obstruction to its progress - in direct proportion to the importance of their original contribution.

Peter's Principle: In an organization, each person rises to the level of his own incompetence.

A reasonable man adapts himself to suit his environment. An unreasonable man persists in attempting to adapt his environment to suit himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man. George Bernard Shaw

A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. Robert A. Heinlein, The Notebook of Lazarus Long

One should as a rule respect public opinion in so far as is necessary to avoid starvation and to keep out of prison, but anything that goes beyond this is voluntary submission to an unnecessary tyranny, and is likely to interfere with happiness in all kinds of ways.    Bertrand Russell