A pretty simple but fun to play with simulator for a concept from mathematical physics called the "2D Coulomb gas". I originally made this for my Bachelor's thesis to create pretty pictures and build intuition but have recently gotten it a fresh coat of paint and better performance curtesy of WebGPU acceleration (ported with liberal help from Codex to get through all of the boilerplate).
Play around with it - hopefully read up more on the 2D Coulomb gas because it is an incredibly deep topic research wise.
Note 2: In this case, 2D means that the force is proportional to distance^-1 instead of the usual distance^-2. It's not a 3D word projected into a plane, it's a real 2D word that lives inside a plane. It would be nice to have an option to switch and compare. I have no intuition about the difference.
Note 3: Somewhere in the middle, it's possible to switch the external potencial from z^2 to z^4 to z^20, where z is the distance from the center.
z^2 "Ginibre" is a nice round surface, like a wok. Electrons get evenly distributed.
z^20 "Mittag-Leffler lambda=10" is flat in the center and then goes up quickly, like a saucepan. Electrons escape from each other, a few of them remain in the center but most get squashed against the circular wall.
z^4 "Mittag-Leffler lambda=2" Something in between
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