Our viva will be on this Wednesday; it should not be too hard though, since I'm somewhat clear of what I've been doing so far... just a bit of revision and clarification to be done before that. SPS Congress will be out next Monday, which means that my group has to hammer out a PowerPoint presentation by this week. This may be a bit of a problem, since we have to explain our project in layman terms (so that the others can understand), but well, since I've gotten over the report, I don't think the presentation will pose much problems.
My project (report cover page above), entitled with a seemingly terrifying but slightly erroneous name of "Massive Particles Orbits Around a Kerr Black Hole", was primarily a half-theory, half-simulation project. Terrifying because of the big words used to capture as much of our topic in as few words as possible, which otherwise would be: "Orbits of Particles with Non-zero Mass (e.g. Electrons, Protons) Around a Rotating Black Hole with No Electrical Charge". Erroneous because it left out one important condition we're considering: spherical orbits, or orbits with constant radius. Without this condition, I might as well do the project all the way until I graduate.
Guided by A/P Edward Teo and Andreas Keil (physics graduate student), we've made pretty satisfying amount of work, although admittedly when it all began I thought the results would be more impressive (other than visually, of course). But then again, for a less-than-three-months project for an undergraduate, I suppose I should not be expected too much.
Last week was quite a rush, really. You see, there exists, after solving certain equations using Mathematica, two sets of solutions (which differ by just a sign in one of the terms). We tried our damnedest best to proof mathematically that one of the sets are unphysical (i.e. incompatible with physical world), which we heavily suspect was the case, but somehow equations that span three lines were just too much to handle (see picture below; that's only a small bit of the attempt). This would pose some sort of problem, since if we do not show that we can eliminate one set of solutions, we might be doing just half of the situation out there.
And it was only about eighteen hours before the report deadline that Andreas suggested doing a simple numerical experiment (simulation) to at least justify the ruling out of that set of solutions (which is, of course, not conclusive, but that's more than what I could ask for). When he suggested that, I almost wanted to bang my head on the wall; as the unofficial C programmer in the group I ought to have thought of it. Fortunately, we still had the time to write out and run a simple program, and include it into the report.
Really, big thanks go to everyone that helped propped up this project. First and foremost, of course, is Edward for taking us blur souls in, and then patiently guiding us through the mess of equations and mystic terms. Andreas too... his questions were sharp and managed to weed out certain inconsistencies that developed as the project progressed. And of course for his suggestions were invaluable. Ah yes, there's Yen Kheng too, fellow group member, and Master of MatLab and Mathematica (that's MMM for you); without his M-ness I think we'd still be stuck at writing equations on the whiteboard. And of course Chu Perng... for all the theoretical work he's done. Man, I owe him one: if he hadn't picked out one fatal error I made near the end of the project... I can't imagine myself explaining during viva how that error found its way into the report!
Okay okay, I know, what a long, naggy post; ending soon! I won't be posting pictures of orbits this time (because I'm too lazy to do so; another time perhaps!), so if you want, just click here to take a look at a few simple plots.
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