Charged particles constrained to a curved surface

Abstract

We study the motion of charged particles constrained to arbitrary two-dimensional curved surfaces but interacting in three-dimensional space via the Coulomb potential. To speed-up the interaction calculations, we use the parallel compute capability of the Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA) of todays graphics boards. The particles and the curved surfaces are shown using the Open Graphics Library (OpenGL). The paper is intended to give graduate students, who have basic experiences with electrostatics and differential geometry, a deeper understanding in charged particle interactions and a short introduction how to handle a many particle system using parallel computing on a single home computer