The Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou problem: Equipartition of energy through computational simulations

Equipartion and conservation of energy are hard concepts to teach or exemplify. With this goal in mind, we implemented two computational experiments of Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsigou. There is an experiment in which the equipartion happens and the other one not. The latter experiment leads to known Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou Paradox with great implications to development of Physics. The experiments are carried out through a home-made numerical implementation and a computational research tool available on internet and usually adopted by scientific community. There is a mathematical analysis, using normal modes, to support the computational experiments.

Keywords
Equipartition of energy; Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsigou paradox; numerical simulation; molecular dynamics