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Theoretical
Research
Groups
Professor Doerte Blume, a theoretical physicist, is interested in
the microscopic behavior of few-particle systems, especially in
atomic, molecular and chemical physics. At low temperatures, many
few-body systems exhibit extreme quantum mechanical behaviors, which
suggest theoretical investigations based on the many-body Schroedinger
equation. Professor Blume is interested in zero temperature as well
as finite temperature behaviors. Recent efforts include investigations
of pure and doped van der Waals clusters, such as helium clusters,
molecular para-hydrogen clusters, and atomic hydrogen and tritium
clusters. She also pursues detailed benchmark studies of atomic
Bose-Einstein condensates under external harmonic confinement, focusing
- among other aspects - on the crossover from three- to one-dimensional
behaviors, as well as of degenerate atomic Fermi gases. Motivated
by seeking a microscopic understanding of few-body systems in terms
of a few key quantities such as collective coordinates, conserved
quantum numbers, or scattering observables, Blume's research combines
analytical and numerical treatments. She has developed various algorithmic
modifications of quantum Monte Carlo techniques, which provide an
efficient means to solving the many-body Schroedinger equation accurately.
Professor
Sukanta Bose is a relativist interested in a variety of phenomena
in gravitation and cosmology. His doctoral dissertation work suggested
for the first time the existence of a mass gap in the astrophysical
formation of black holes. Thus, arbitrarily tiny black holes probably
do not form in a stellar collapse. There, he also proposed a quantizable
two-dimensional toy model in the quest for resolving the information-loss
paradox associated with black hole formation and evaporation. It
was subsequently shown that higher order corrections in this model
(known as the Bose-Parker-Peleg model) render the Hawking radiation
non-thermal, thus, offering a channel for information escape, and
a possible resolution of the paradox. More recently, he has studied
the production of gravitational waves in cosmological and astrophysical
scenarios. He has also devised strategies for detecting them in
earth-based detectors, such as LIGO, GEO, TAMA, and Virgo, and the
proposed space-based detector LISA. His research focuses on how
these gravitational-wave observatories can perform stringent strong-field
tests of Einstein's theory of gravity and explore whether or not
our Universe has extra dimensions.
Professor
Michael Miller is a condensed matter theorist whose interests include
the statistical mechanics of model nonlinear systems, classical
and quantum liquid surfaces and interfaces. Recently Professor Miller
has been examining the equation of state of 3He in surface states
in superfluid 4He films, a two-dimensional fermi liquid. This work
requires developing new techniques for treating a strongly-correlated,
inhomogeneous fermion system with a frequency dependent effective
interaction. In addition, he is studying the ground-states of classical
systems with competing length scales. This system can have enormously
complicated phase diagrams whose analysis requires special techniques.
Professor
Steven Tomsovic's research focuses on chaos, semiclassical methods
with applications to atomic, molecular, microwave and mesoscopic
systems, and symmetry violation in the compound nucleus. His primary
interest is in understanding the relationship between the quantum
mechanical and classical worlds. In recent work, he has shown how
chaotic classical trajectories can be used to build very accurate
long-time quantum mechanical propagators, that chaos assists tunneling
phenomena, and that quantum eigenstates of systems which are chaotic
in the classical limit can sometimes be quantitatively constructed
with classical orbits. In addition, he has developed theoretical
methods for understanding the magnitude of fundamental symmetry
violation in heavy nuclei; i.e., such as parity or time-reversal
noninvariance in slow-neutron resonances. The techniques are statistical
and based on generalized central limit theorems operating in systems
possessing shell structure.
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