Is learning LAMMPS MD hard? what prior knowledge is required
That depends on how easy it is for you to learn new skills and what kind of calculations and systems you want to apply LAMMPS to. There is plenty of tutorial materials available online. You can give it a try and find out for yourself.
You need some level of understanding on doing computational research, some statistical thermodynamics and general MD knowledge. Most important is to find a tutor that can advise you and guide you while learning, since MD is as much a craft as it is science. Trying to learn MD and LAMMPS all by yourself is not recommended and will be painful and fraught with mistakes and midunderstandings.
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How difficult “MD” is (like any other scientific technique) depends on how accurate your results need to be and how many people have tried something similar before you. It is a little like asking how difficult it is to build “an interferometer”. You can build a LEGO interferometer on your tabletop, or you can build a LIGO interferometer that’s several kilometers long, costs hundreds of millions of dollars, and can detect gravitational waves and win the Nobel Prize in Physics.
So you should first work out: (1) what do you want to measure, and how accurately; (2) whether other people have used MD to measure something similar, and (3) how you will know whether the answer is reasonable or not. Then you should also work out how much time you are willing to spend on trying MD, and what your next plan is if MD doesn’t work. Then – after you have some sense of what your scientific project is the time to figure out whether you can learn MD or not.