Philip B. Allen
Department of Physics and Astronomy
SUNY
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3800

office: Physics B-146 
tel: (631) 632-8179
fax: (631) 632-4977

email: philip.allen@sunysb.edu
  Fall 2008 schedule

Philip B. AllenVLab workshop, July 2005 
Renata Wentzcovitch, organizer, and P. B. Allen, attendee

Biography:

From 1954 to 1960 I attended Roxbury Latin School, in West Roxbury, outside Boston.  After undergraduate study at Amherst College (BA 1964) and graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley (PhD 1969 supervised by Marvin L. Cohen), I spent two years at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ. Since 1971 I have worked in the Physics and Astronomy Department of SUNY, Stony Brook. Sabbaticals and leaves have been spent at the Cavendish Lab, University of California, Berkeley, the Max-Planck Institut (Stuttgart) (under sponsorship of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation),the Naval Research Lab, Brookhaven National Lab, Los Alamos National Lab, IRRMA (at the EPFL Lausanne) and the Dept. of Condensed Matter Physics, University of Geneva, and most recently (2002-2003) at Columbia University, with funding from the Guggenheim Foundation. I frequently spend a day at Brookhaven National Lab, to work with friends in various departments.  Recently, my research has switched a little from mainstream solid state physics into two hot areas: nanoscience and earth & planetary materials physics.  To initiate the nanoscience part, from Sept. 22-25, 2002, my friends and I organized a workshop, "Electron-Phonon Effects in Nanosystems" (EPENS'02) in Montauk NY.  The meeting accidentally coincided with my 60th birthday.  To initiate the earth & planetary materials part, I joined the VLab consortium, organized by my former post-doc, Renata Wentzcovitch (see above).  Current nanoscience research is with the BNL/Stony Brook working group SWaSSiT.
 
 

Present Members of my Group:

 Xiao Shen
Li Li 

Group Photos

Former Members of my Group:

Postdocs, Students

Family
My wife, Ellen, is adjunct associate professor of English at Suffolk Community College.  We have four children. 
Family Photos


P. B. Allen (center) with (left to right) former student Jaroslav Fabian, former secretary Audra Weiser, former student and former faculty colleague Jainendra Jain, and former student Tim Beaulac.  Photo by Vasili Perebeinos, at the alumni reunion June 16-18, 2000.

Research interests:  see also my pages on  Computational Earth Mineral Physics, Computational Nanoscience.  Also see the page for SWaSSiT (Solar water splitting simulation team).

My specialty is condensed matter theory. My research interests have included high temperature superconductors, transport properties of all forms of solids, polarons, metal/insulator transitions, and properties of glasses.  Now I work mainly on various aspects of nanoscience: nanowires, structural, electronic, and vibrational issues, including vibronic effects in electron behavior, and electrical dipole formation (spontaneous or structurally intrinsic).  I also work on the physics of the earth's lower mantle, the physical properties of the high pressure and high temperature rock phases.  For example, my students are thinking about heat conduction both by phonons and by photons, and whether the "high-spin" to "low-spin" transition of the Fe impurities affects heat transport.  See my Favorite Publications for more details.

Illustrations of Recent Work:

Sodium Fluoride was chosen as the simplest material for study of electrical polarity in nanocrystals.
Click here for some illustrations of work on vibrations in amorphous silicon, or vibrations of a Lennard-Jones glass.
Click here or here for some illustrations of work on polarons and Franck-Condon effect.
Saturation of thermal resistivity seems closely related to saturation of electrical resistivity.  Here are our recent results.
Electrochemical charge transfer events lie at the heart of several of my current interests, such as corrosion and photocatalytic water splitting.  My student Li Li has solved a nice toy model problem involving charge transfer.  The process is fundamentally non-adiabatic, which presents a challenge to current simulation methods involving classical trajectories for nuclear motion.
 

Recent Publications

P. B. Allen, J. L. Feldman, J. Fabian, and F. Wooten,
"Diffusons, Locons, Propagons: Character of Atomic Vibrations in Amorphous Si"
Phil. Mag. B 79, 1715-32 (1999).

P. B. Allen and V. Perebeinos,
"The Anti-Jahn-Teller Polaron in LaMnO3"
Phys. Rev. B 60, 10747 (1999).

P. B. Allen, S. Aubin, and R. B. Doak,
"Surface Phonons and Other Localized Excitations"
Am. J. Phys. 68, 228-231 (March, 2000).

P. B. Allen and V. Perebeinos,
"Self-trapped Exciton and Franck-Condon Spectra Predicted in LaMnO3"
Phys. Rev. Letters 83, 4828 (1999).

Branislav K. Nikolic and P. B. Allen,
"Quantum transport in ballistic conductors: evolution from conductance quantization to resonant tunneling," cond-mat/0002415. J. Phys. Cond. Matter 12, 9629 (2000).

V. Perebeinos, P. B. Allen, and M. Weinert,
"First-principles Calculations of the Self-trapped Exciton in Crystalline NaCl"
cond-mat/0003288; Phys. Rev. B 62, 12589 (2000).

V. Perebeinos and P. B. Allen,
"Franck-Condon-Broadened Angle-Resolved Photoemission Spectra Predicted in LaMnO3"
cond-mat/0005146; Phys. Rev. Letters 85, 5178 (2000).

Branislav K. Nikolic and P. B. Allen,
"Resistivity of a Metal between the Boltzmann Transport Regime and the Anderson Transition,''
cond-mat/0005389; Phys. Rev. B 63, 020201 (2001).

Vasili Perebeinos, Philip B. Allen, and James Napolitano,
"Exact, numerical, and mean field behavior of a dimerizing lattice in one dimension,"
cond-mat/0010037; Solid State Commun. 18, 215 (2001).

W. Garber, F. M. Tangerman, P. B. Allen, and J. I. Feldman,
"Numerical Study of the Localization-Delocalization Transition for Vibrations in Amorphous Silicon,"
cond-mat/0101070; Phil. Mag. Letters 81, 433 (2001).

Philip B. Allen,
"Electron Spin-Flip Relaxation by One-Magnon Processes: Application to the Gadolinium Surface Band,"
cond-mat/0011121; Phys. Rev. B 63, 214410 (2001).

Y.-R. Chen and P. B. Allen,
"Spin versus Lattice Polaron: Prediction for Electron-Doped CaMnO3,''
cond-mat/0101354; Phys. Rev. B 64, 064401 (2001)

Vasili Perebeinos and P. B. Allen,
"Multi-phonon Resonant Raman Scattering Predicted in LaMnO3 from the Franck-Condon Process via Self-Trapped Excitons,"
cond-mat/0007301; Phys. Rev. B 64, 085118 (2001)

J.J. Tu, G.L. Carr, V. Perebeinos, C.C. Homes, M. Strongin , P.B. Allen, W.N. Kang, E.M. Choi, H.J. Kim, and Sung-Ik Lee,
"Optical studies of charge dynamics in c-axis oriented superconducting MgB2 films"
(cond-mat/0107349); Phys. Rev. Letters 87, 277001 (2001).

Ilka B. Bischofs, Vladimir N. Kostur, and Philip B. Allen,
"Polaron and Bipolaron Defects in a Charge Density Wave: a Model for Lightly Doped BaBiO3"
(cond-mat/0108089);  Phys. Rev. B 65, 115112 (2002).

Philip B. Allen and Ilka B. Bischofs,
"Self-Trapped Exciton Defects in a Charge Density Wave: Electronic Excitations of BaBiO3,"
cond-mat/0108090;  Phys. Rev. B 65, 115113 (2002).

Y.-R. Chen, V. Perebeinos and P. B. Allen,
"Polaronic Signatures in Mid-Infrared Spectra: Prediction for LaMnO3 and CaMnO3,"
cond-mat/0111226; Phys. Rev. B 65, 205207 (2002).

Philip B. Allen,
"Metals with Short Electron Mean Free-Paths: Saturation versus Escalation of Resistivity,"
Physica B 318, pp24-27 (2002).

A.V. Fedorov, T. Valla, F. Liu, P.D. Johnson, M. Weinert, and P.B. Allen
"A Spin-Resolved Photoemission Study of Photohole Lifetimes in Ferromagnetic Gadolinium"
cond-mat/0106453; Phys. Rev. B 65, 212409 (2002).

Ilka B. Bischofs, Philip B. Allen, Vladimir N. Kostur, and Rahul Bhargava,
"Topological Doping of a 3D Peierls System: Predicted Structure of Doped BaBiO3,"
cond-mat/0203486; Phys. Rev. B 66, 174108 (2002).

Philip B. Allen,
"Dipole Interactions and Electrical Polarity in Nanosystems -- the Clausius-Mossotti and Related Models"
cond-mat/0307209; J. Chem. Phys. 120, 2951-2962 (2004).

Ying-Rei Chen, Vasili Perebeinos, and Philip B. Allen,
"Density Functional Study of Cubic to Rhombohedral Transition in a-AlF3"
cond-mat/0302272; Phys. Rev. B 69, 054109:1-6 (2004).

Philip B. Allen
"Dipole Interactions in Nanosystems"
cond-mat/0309392; in Molecular Nanowires and Other Quantum Objects,
edited by A. S. Alexandrov, J. Demsar, and I. K. Yanson
(NATO Science Series, II. Mathematics, Physics, and Chemistry – Vol. 148)
(Kluwer, Dordrecht, 2004) pp. 29-38.

Yulia Gilman, Jamil Tahir-Kheli, Philip B. Allen, and William A. Goddard III,
“Numerical study of resistivity of model disordered three-dimensional metals,”
cond-mat/ 0407790, Phys. Rev. B 70, 224201 (2004).

P. B. Allen, A. G. Abanov, and R. Requist,
"Quantum electrical dipole in triangular systems: A model for spontaneous polarity in metal clusters"
Phys. Rev. A 71 043203 (2005). cond-mat/0311004.

Vasili Perebeinos, Philip B. Allen, and Mark Pederson,
"Reexamination of the Jahn-Teller Instability in C6H6+ and C6H6-"
cond-mat/0208051 Phys. Rev. A 72, 012501:1-6 (2005).

Mark R. Pederson, Tunna Baruah, Philip B. Allen, and Christian Schmidt,
“Density-Functional-Based Determination of Vibrational Polarizabilities in Molecules within the Double-Harmonic approximation: Derivation and Application”
cond-mat/0410130 J. Chem. Theory Comput. 1, 590-596 (2005).

K. Umemoto, R. M. Wentzcovitch, and P. B. Allen,
“Dissociation of MgSiO3 in the Cores of Gas Giants and Terrestrial Exoplanets,"
Science 311, 983-986 (2006).
P. B. Allen, Y.-R. Chen, S. Chaudhuri, and C. P. Grey,
“Octahedral Tilt Instability of ReO3-type Crystals”,
cond-mat/0311014 Phys. Rev. B 73, 172102 (2006).

A. V. Shytov and P. B. Allen,
"Electronic Polarity of Nanoclusters: Quantum and Many-Body Effects,"
cond-mat/0509124 Phys. Rev. B 74, 075419:1-6 (2006).

Philip B. Allen, “Electron Transport,”
in Conceptual Foundations of Material Properties:A standard model for calculation of ground- and excited-state properties”
M. L. Cohen and S. G. Louie, editors (Elsevier, 
Amsterdam, 2006), pp. 165-218.

Philip B. Allen, "Nanocrystalline Nanowires I: Structure" Nano Letters 7, 6-10 (2007).
Philip B. Allen, "Nanocrystalline Nanowires II: Phonons" Nano Letters 7, 11-14 (2007).

Philip B. Allen, "Nanocrystalline Nanowires III: Electrons" Nano Letters 7, 1220-1223 (2007).

Xiao Shen, Philip B. Allen, James T. Muckerman, James W. Davenport, and Jin-Cheng Zheng,
"Wire versus Tube: Stability of Small ZnO Nanostructures," Nano Letters7, 2267-2271 (2007).

Yulia Gilman, Philip B. Allen, and Mark S. Hybertsen,
"Density-Functional Study of Adsorption of Isocyanides on the Gold (111) Surface,”
cond-mat/0411320, J. Phys. Chem. C 112, 3314-3320 (2008).

Tao Sun, Philip B. Allen, David G. Stahnke, Steven D. Jacobsen, and Christopher C. Homes,
"Infrared Optical Properties of Ferropericlase (Mg1-xFexO): Expedriment and Theory,"
cond-mat/0704.2267, Phys. Rev. B 77, 134303:1-7 (2008).

Preprints Available:

Philip B. Allen, W. Garber, and L. Angelani,
"Character of Atomic Vibrations in a Lennard-Jones Glass"
cond-mat/0307435

Philip B. Allen,
“Electron Self-Energy and Generalized Drude Formula for Infrared Conductivity of Metals,”
cond-mat/0407777.

Christian Schmidt, Philip B. Allen, Mark R. Pederson, and Tunna Baruah,
“Evolution of Electronic and Vibrational Polarity of NaF Nanocrystals from Diatomic to Bulk: A Density Functional Study,”
cond-mat/0411009.

Xiao Shen, Mark R. Pederson, Jin-Cheng Zheng, James W. Davenport, James T. Muckerman, and Philip B. Allen,
"Electronic Structure of ZnO nanowire,”
cond-mat/0610002.

 
 
 
 
 
Notes Available:  Linear Response Theory (short) Powerpoint presentations: Phonons
Linear Response Theory (long) history of DFT
Poisson sum formula
2 by 2 matrix algebra
Spin-resolved electron relaxation
Eliashberg Tc fortran code (1974)
Electrons in graphene -- massless Dirac electrons and Berry phase

pdf Copies of Hard-to-Access Papers:

P. B. Allen, "Electron-Phonon Coupling Constants", in Handbook of Superconductivity, edited by Charles P. Poole Jr. (Academic Press, San Diego, 2000).
P. B. Allen, "Single Particle versus Collective Electronic Excitations,'' in From Quantum Mechanics to Technology, edited by Z. Petru, J. Przystawa, and K. Rapcewicz (Springer, Berlin, 1996) pp. 125-141.
P. B. Allen, “Boltzmann Theory and Resistivity of Metals”, in Quantum Theory of Real Materials, edited by J. R. Chelikowsky and S. G. Louie (Kluwer, Boston, 1996) Ch. 17 pp 219-250.

Other Links:

There is a wonderful article by Braun and Smirnov in the Journal of Chemical Education, "Why is Water Blue."
Another beautiful article is John Bahcall's piece, "How the Sun Shines."
A great story of the joy of scientific discovery is Jocelyn Bell Burnell's account of the discovery of pulsars.
Visit the Condensed Matter Group home page for information about my colleagues and announcements.
Visit the Condensed Matter Seminar home page for the current schedule.
Visit the Journal Club home page for the current schedule.
Jokes my sister sent.
Undergraduate affairs web page
Web page for the Alumni Symposium PAM "Physics and Astronomy at the Millenium"
Web page for the conference EPENS'02 "Electron-Phonon Effects in Nanosystems"
Photos from the conference EPENS'02
Photos from the banquet and concert of EPENS'02
Photos from my 60th birthday party, Montauk NY, Sept. 22, 2002
David Yuen's "look-alike" page

Teaching

During Spring 2001 I taught Physics 131
During Fall 2001 I taught PHY 313/CEI 544.
During Spring 2002 I taught PHY 104 and PHY 599.01.
During Fall 2003 I taught PHY 555.
During Spring 2004 I taught Physics 556 and Physics 104
During Fall 2004 I taught Physics 555
During Spring 2005 I taught Physics 556
During Fall 2005 I teach Physics 540
During Spring 2006 I taught Physics 131
During Spring 2007 I taught Physics 556
During Fall 2007 I taught Physics 555
During Fall 2008 I am teaching Physics 311 and Physics 125
[SUNY logo comes here][conference logo comes here][Physics and Astronomy Department logo comes here]
 

Disclaimer:

Opinions expressed on this page are my own and not those of the University or the State of New York.
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Philip B. Allen                                 
Department of Physics                           Office: (516) 632-8179
SUNY @ Stony Brook                              FAX:    (516) 632-4977
Stony Brook, NY 11794-3800              E-mail:philip.allen@sunysb.edu
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revised 09/23/2008