This lecture and lab presents a brief introduction to computational physics using examples from self-consistent field calculations of the electronic energy and density of various atoms throughout the periodic table.

Pick at least one of your favorite atoms from the periodic table and run the computer program graphatom to determine:

1. A plot of the electron density for that atom.
2. A plot of the one-electron wavefunctions (labeling the curves -- 1s, 2s,... 2p, 3p... etc.)
3. A list of the total energy and the one-electron eigenvalues for the ground state and at least one excited or ionic state.

For extra credit, you may wish to run the program frozencore to study systematic variations of the energy of an atom in various electronic configurations.

1. graphatom
2. frozencore

Note: In order to run these programs, it will be helpful to type:

set path= ( $path /users/faculty/phy/natalie/www-home/phy346/programs/ . )

Note: In order to run the plotting programs you will need to make sure that your path also includes the directory:
/users/faculty/phylib/bin/

Also for plotting, make sure that you have activated x-windows and that you set the parameters:
setenv DISPLAY 152.17.xxx.xxx:0
where the xxx's refer to your local IP address, which can be determined from the windows program --C:\WINDOWS\winipcfg.exe.