Old research projects
Just because I'm not doing it, doesn't always mean I've
lost interest!
Structural energy of elemental Boron
As an offshoot of our interest in (plausible) hypothetical
quasicrystalline Boron
-- real boron, in all its polymorphous forms,
is built from icosahedral clusters --
my Ph. D. student Wei-Jing Zhu
in his thesis, extracted an empirical potential (the first) for elemental
Boron, from a database of LDA total energies
of hypothetical structures.
Click
here for a version of this work in preparation for Phys. Rev. B.
Related to quasicrystals
Nonlinear or collective dynamics
In the past I worked on statistical physics topics
of self-organized criticality and
on percolation (that includes a bit on cluster-update algorithms).
Related to exact diagonalization and highly frustrated magnetism)
Semiclassical approaches to spin systems
We applied semiclassical techniques to relate the
eigenstates of quantum spin systems to their classical dynamics
(with Paul Houle PhD '98 and N.-G. Zhang PhD '02).
Click
here
for some reprints on semiclassical dynamics.
(Supported by NSF grant.)
Related to exact diagonalization and highly frustrated magnetism)
Surface growth models
Related to height models (under highly frustrated magnetism)
I've been interested in novel mathematical characterizations of rough surface
morphologies, and in the relationship of microscopic to
continuum growth models.
See
"Nonlinear Measures for Characterizing Rough Surface Morphologies" ,
by Jan\'e Kondev, C. L. Henley, and David G. Salinas,
Phys. Rev. E 61, 104-125 (2000).
(Supported by my NSF grant)