Toler's paper published in Computer Physics Communications!

Toler’s work — a massive effort combining classical physics and discrete differential geometry in order to implement many-body simulations of particles on curved surfaces — has been published in Computer Physics Communications! Simulating particles that simply move along geodesics is…difficult, but doable. Many researchers who have looked at the problem of studying particles on manifolds adopt a hybrid approach of having particles move along geodesics but interact with each other according to their Euclidean separation. There are a few surfaces for which geodesic interactions can be analytically calculated, but in the more general case the problem is both difficult and computationally expensive. Toler implemented a novel scheme leveraging advances in discrete differential geometry, and we’ve now released an open-source simulation package based on those methods. Read more here, and check out the open-source software package on the lab github page!