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Students Yiing-Rei Chen, Vasili Perebeinos, Branislav Nikolic, and
Ilka Bischofs, taken in July 2000 on the occasion of Branislav successfully
defending his thesis. A few weeks later, Branislav moved to Washington
DC to take a post-doc position in the group of Jim Freericks at Georgetown
University. |
| The committee which examined Branislav's thesis. From left to
right, Myron Strongin (BNL), P. B. Allen, Dr. Branislav K. Nikolic, Gerry
Brown, and Vladimir Goldman (holding a glass of champagne.) One part
of Branislav's thesis was a theoretical analysis of an experiment of Myron
Strongin's on the optical properties of thin films of lead. That
research was published in a joint paper in Phys. Rev. Letters, fall 1999.
Other parts of Branislav's thesis deal with currents in mesoscopic metals,
and the crossover between Boltzmann transport and strong Anderson localization. |
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Christopher Yee-Chan (left) and Philip Miu (right) are students at
The Wheatley School (public high school of Old Westbury, NY.) During
the summer of 2000 they worked with me on the problem of whether
vibrations in an anharmonic linear chain can equilibrate. This famous
problem was first investigated by Fermi, Pasta, and Ulam. The issue
of equilibration may or may not have been solved in the intervening 45
years, but even if it has, it still provokes heated debate. We think
we might be able to improve the understanding by studying how pulses evolve
toward equilibrium. The pulses are initially nearly monochromatic
traveling waves. |
| The committee which examined Vasili Perebeinos's thesis, March 11,
2001. From the left: Jim Davenport, PBA, Vasili, Jack Smith, and
Peter Stephens. On April 1, 2001, Vasili became post-doc at Brookhaven
National Lab, working with Mike Weinert. Vasili's thesis was about
self-trapped states in crystalline solids. Perhaps the simplest and
neatest result is the picture of the lowest electronic excitation of LaMnO3
as a self-trapped (orbital) exciton (or "orbiton"). |
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