The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem: Equipartition of energy through computational simulations

Abstract

Equipartion and conservation of energy are hard concepts to teach or exemplify. With this goal in mind, we implemented two computational experiments of Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsigou. There is an experiment in which the equipartion happens and the other one not. The latter experiment leads to known Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou Paradox with great implications to development of Physics. The experiments are carried out through a home-made numerical implementation and a computational research tool available on internet and usually adopted by scientific community. There is a mathematical analysis, using normal modes, to support the computational experiments.

Keywords
Equipartition of energy; Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsigou paradox; numerical simulation; molecular dynamics