Students from a Belgian university can do an internship or a M.Sc. thesis (mémoire/masterproef) at the Royal Meteorological Institute of Belgium. Example of topics:
Contact me (main topic: satellite imagery; department: Observations) or my colleague Jonathan Demaeyer (main topic: statistical methods; department: Meteorological and climatological services) to discuss the orientation that matches best your academic interests. For all projects, there will be computer programming in either C (for some operational programs, for instance) or Python (using open-source packages such as satpy). Our emails are firstname.lastname@meteo.be
From 2nd year of bachelor to final year of master.
Exercises for Enrico Carlon's statistical mechanics class.
Exercises for Carlo Vanderzande.
Méthodes de simulation microscopique, Michel Mareschal.
In charge of simulation assignements.
Cours de Physique Générale de BA1 en sciences, Pasquale Nardone et Frank Ferrari.
Exercices, laboratoires et gestion (site web, examens, notes de labo, horaires, équipe pédagogique).
Laboratoires associés aux cours de thermodynamique et mécanique quantique (phys-f-201 et phys-f-203), Jean-Paul Ryckaert et Serge Massar.
Cours d'électronique de BA3 Physique, Philippe Emplit.
Exercices et laboratoires.
Introduction to quantum physics and relativity.
Self-propelled particles, also called nanomotors, are small devices that convert the energy of a fuel into motion. They have been made and observed in laboratories and are the subject of intensive theoretical studies. Synthetic motors share traits with biological motors: length-scale, fuel consumption, fluctuations.
I propose to work on the simulation and modeling of chemically propelled nanomotors. This work involves computer programs that combines the Multiparticle Collision Dynamics (MPCD) algorithm, Molecular Dynamics (MD) and chemical activity. The type of the motor can be simple (two spheres, the "dimer" or "dumbbell" motor) or more complicated assembly of particles. The most critical part of the work is to understand how the fluids organizes around a motor and ultimately exerts a propulsive force on it. Comparison to simpler models of stochastic particles will be made.
Familiarity with statistical physics, computer simulations and programming is strongly encouraged. The focus can be directed towards numerical work (GPU computing, etc) or towards the modeling (stochastic processes).
The computational work done during the thesis, on the basis of existing programs, will be released publicly (code, scripts and data) under open license.