This is the season when our second-year students are picking the projects they want to do in their third year, as are those third-year students intending to carry on for Year 4 of the MPhys programme. I’ve been chatting to quite a few students about this particular project so thought I’d do a quick post here.
One of the third-year projects I’ve got in the current catalogue for next year concerns a computer model of dielectric breakdown based on the idea of diffusion-limited aggregation. This is a neat model that allows the students to simulate pretty patterns like the one shown on the left.
The mathematics of it was first presented in Niemeyer, L., Pietronero, L., Wiesmann, H., “Fractal dimension of dielectric breakdown,” Physical Review Letters 52 (1984), 1033-1036.
Dielectric breakdown happens when a sufficiently large voltage is applied across a material that doesn’t normally conduct electricity, the classic example being a lightning strike. Here’s another example, which I find particularly electrifying…
Classical physics can be fun, you know!
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