Coagulation project documentation
Continuation of the M.Sc. thesis Investigating the Feasibility of utilizing Stochastic Sampling of Colliding Circumstellar Dust Particle Pairs for Computational Cost Optimization of the Smoluchowski Coagulation Equation’s Numerical Integration (V. Mader, Heidelberg University, 2024; supervisor C. P. Dullemond): a Rust re-implementation of the local dust coagulation-fragmentation model, a suite of time integrators up to an own Radau IIA, a systematic study of Monte Carlo kernel sampling, an interactive web visualization, and a joint paper.
Where to start
- Vision and research goals: goals, research questions, hypotheses, paper pitch.
- Thesis review: what the thesis established and the findings (F1 to F10) that change the method.
- Roadmap: milestones M0 to M11 with tasks and acceptance criteria.
Contents
| Folder | Document | Purpose |
|---|---|---|
planning/ | 00-vision.md | Why, what, research questions, hypotheses |
| 01-thesis-review.md | Critical review of thesis and code, with file references | |
| 02-roadmap.md | Milestones, tasks, acceptance criteria, dependency graph, timeline | |
| 03-verification.md | Oracles, invariants, error metrics, test budget | |
| 04-experiments.md | Estimator theory and experiments E1 to E16 | |
| 05-architecture.md | Crates, core abstractions, data flow, config sketch | |
| 06-risks-and-open-questions.md | Open questions, decision log of the grill session, risks (X1 to X11) | |
| 07-visualization.md | Requirements for the web tool (design comes first) | |
| 08-paper-and-outreach.md | Collaboration, paper outline, reproducibility | |
adr/ | README.md | Architecture Decision Records 0001 to 0016 |
reference/ | literature.md | All sources with DOIs, local PDF links, role, reading status |
| glossary.md | Terms across astrophysics, numerics, sampling, software | |
| notation.md | Symbol table mapping thesis, coag_py, and Rust names |
Conventions
- IDs: goals Gn, research questions RQn, hypotheses Hn, findings Fn, milestones Mn and tasks Mn.m, experiments En, questions Qn, risks Xn. IDs are stable; retired items are struck through, not renumbered.
- Status lines: every planning document starts with its status and version; bump the version when content changes materially.
- Decisions: a choice with alternatives becomes an ADR (Proposed until Vincent accepts it); smaller scope decisions go into the decision log.
- Diagrams: Mermaid in Markdown, so they render on GitHub and in most editors and stay diffable.
- Language: English; symbols as in notation.md; SI units.
- Sources:
../related/(project root) holds symlinks to the thesis (msc-thesis/), its code (msc-thesis.py/), the thesis working folder with papers (Write Master's Thesis./), and the paper inbox (Papers/). They are read-only: nothing there is edited, and what we need is rebuilt in this repo, mostly from scratch in Rust.