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Topical Group on Few-Body Systems Newsletter, February 2005 |
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
| Message from the Chair |
| Elections
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| Call for Fellowship nominations
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| APS Spring Meeting (Tampa, April 16-19, 2005) |
| Other Meetings |
| Gordon Conferences |
| Election Candidates
Candidates for Vice-Chair Don H. Madison (U. Missouri) William P. Reinhardt (U. Washington) Candidates for Executive Committee Nora Berrah (Western Michigan U.) Reinhold Blumel (Wesleyan) Sabine Jeschonnek (Ohio State) Bira van Kolck (U. Arizona) |
As the time to elect the next vice-chair and executive committee members
approaches, it is my pleasure to say hello and welcome to all members of
the Few-Body Topical Group (GFB). Once again we are fortunate this year
to be able to introduce some strong candidates for your consideration.
To indicate their specialized field and personal expertise, each candidate
has provided a biographical history and written a brief statement outlining
their intentions and aspirations for you to read. Please consider the
merits
of each candidate before voting online.
You will get a seperate e-mail via APS with your access link to
the electronic ballot. GFB provides an important forum to voice support for research in few-body physics, and it is therefore vital to keep the interest and membership thriving. Please, encourage your colleagues and students to join GFB. It can be done online at the address www.aps.org/memb/unitapp.html Please attend the GFB annual business meeting which will, as usual, be held at the Spring Meeting of the American Physical Society, this year in Tampa on April 16-19, 2005. The business meeting will be held on Sunday, April 17 at 16:30 after Session M5. Finally, I would like to congratulate Andris Stelbovics and Larry Weinstein who were all elected to APS Fellowship this year under GFB sponsorship. Rocco Schiavilla, Chair GFB 2004-2005 |
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We will elect a Vice-Chair and two members of our Executive Committee. The Vice-Chair serves a term of one year, becomes Chair-Elect the next year, and assumes the Chair the following year. The Members-at-large of the Executive Committee serve three-year terms. The newly elected officers will assume their positions beginning May 2005. Don Madison and Bill Reinhardt are the candidates for Vice Chair. Candidates for the Executive Committee are Nora Berrah, Reinhold Blumel, Sabine Jeschonnek, and Bira van Kolck. Brief biographies and statements of the candidates are given below. The present officers are Tom Rescigno, Past-Chair; Rocco Schiavilla, Chair; Colm Whelan, Chair-Elect; Werner Tornow, Vice-Chair; Charlotte Elster, Secretary-Treasurer. The current Executive Committee members (and the years their terms expire) are: Chris Greene (07), Ricardo Alarcon (07), Ben Gibson (06), Ravi Rau (06), Daniel Phillips (05), Joseph Macek (05).As last year, this years elections will be carried out electronically. All current GFB members will receive a separate email message which gives the Web Site for elections and instructions about voting. Please make sure to vote before the 3 April DEADLINE. |
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A major benefit to the members of the topical group is that the group can nominate members to become Fellows of the Society. The number of nominations the group can put forward depends predominantly on its total membership. The choice of our candidate(s) from among those next nominated will be made by our current Fellowship Committee: Werner Tornow, Charlotte Elster, and Chris Greene. I urge you to think about colleagues worthy of Fellowship who have never been elected and get together the necessary material for nomination to APS. Current APS members and their affiliations can be found on the APS website. Bear in mind that the few-body community, which is quite active outside the United States, has a number of distinguished physicists from foreign institutions who are not APS Fellows. If we nominate two of these members for APS Fellowship, we may be able to promote two GFB members to fellowship using the leverage of co-sponsorship with the International Forum. I also ask you to consider worthy candidates from under-represented minority groups. We had two new Fellows (see below) elected through our group last year. Our Fellowship Committee can only make recommendations on the nomination packages that are submitted by our membership, so let's do our part and nominate deserving candidates. Information regarding the nomination procedure and the necessary forms can be easily obtained through the APS home page (www.aps.org/fellowship/) or our own group home page (under Fellows). The DEADLINE for nominations for our Topical Group is 1 April each year. Please make sure the full package has been submitted to the APS before this date. CONGRATULATIONS TO OUR NEW FELLOWS Congratulations to Andris Stelbovics and Lawrence Weinstein who were elected to Fellowship in the APS under the auspices of the GFB last year.
Stelbovics' fellowship citation reads citation reads
and Weinstein was cited |
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The APS "April" Meeting will be held from April 16-19, 2005 in
Tampa, Florida. |
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GFB at the DAMOP Meeting GFB will co-sponsor an invited session at the DAMOP meeting. Don Madison will be organizing the session. Please check the DAMOP website for futher details. |
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There is not currently a Gordon Conference on Few Body Problems. However, there are Gordon Conferences on Atomic Physics, Nuclear Chemistry, and Nuclear Physics that will be of interest to some of our membership.
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Don H. Madison Biography
B.A. (Mathematics), Sioux Falls College, 1967; Ph.D. (Physics), Florida
State University, 1972; Postdoctoral Research Associate, University of
North Carolina (Eugen Merzbacher), 1972-74; Assistant, Associate and
Professor of Physics, Drake University, 1974-1984; Ellis and Nelle Levitt
Professor of Physics, Drake University, 1984-88; Professor of Physics,
University of Missouri-Rolla; 1988-98; Curators' Professor of Physics,
University of Missouri-Rolla, 1998-present; Visiting Scientist, University
of M\374nster, 1984; Visiting Scientist, Flinders U. of South Australia,
1988; Visiting Scientist, Institute of Theoretical Physics, Santa Barbara,
1991; Director of the Laboratory for Atomic, Molecular and Optical
Research,
University of Missouri-Rolla, 1999-2002; Fellow of the American Physical
Society, 1993; President of TAMOC, 1994-1998; DAMOP Program Committee,
1994-1997; 2004-2006; Organizer of DAMOP Undergraduate Research
Competition,
1994-2000; APS Committee on Education, 1997-1999; DAMOP Committee on
Publications, 1996-1999; DAMOP Education Committee, 1999-2005; ICPEAC
general committee, 1999-2003; International Chair for five different
meetings in Australia, China and the US, treasurer of the GEC (2002-2006),
Organizing committee for 18 different International meetings. Candidate's Statement I learned scattering theory from nuclear books and papers in the late 60's and early 70's and have been working in AMO physics since. In spite of my best intentions, I have not managed to keep up with developments in other areas very well. On the other hand, it is inconceivable that my own work could not have benefited from advancements in related fields. For me, the primary appeal of the APS Topical Group on Few-Body Systems and Multiparticle Dynamics is to bring together people with similar interests from different specialties to provide both a forum for presenting the latest developments as well as for cultivating cross disciplinary collaborations. I think this is the strength of the forum and, if I were elected, I would encourage activities designed to promote and enhance this strength. Return to biographies listing
Biography Bill Reinhardt is Professor of Chemistry, and Adjunct Professor of Physics, at the University of Washington, Seattle. He has long been an active participant in the AMO and Few Body physics communities, having attended all of, and "chaired" one of, the original Few Body Gordon Conferences. His current interest is in the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates where the few body problems run from the use of "pseudo-potentials" to describe "cold-collision" pair interactions in the presence of correlations, and the dynamics of solitons and vortices as the "emergent" few body particle-like excitations in BECs. He is a Fellow of the AAAS, and APS, recently a Phi Beta Kappa Visiting Scholar, gives public lectures on chaos theory, and "physics and literature", and has co-authored a Cambridge University Press monograph (with Reinhold Blumel) on Chaos in Atomic Physics. He and his research group have published more than 200 journal papers. He has served on the AMOP National Research Council Advisory Panel, and on the nominating committees for the DCP and GFB, as well as Chairing the Theoretical Chemistry sub-Division of the American Chemical Society. He is currently on the Editorial Boards of J. Phys. B (IOPP, UK) and Phys. Rev. A. Candidate's Statement The Few-Body topical group exists to maintain an active interface between workers in theoretical and computational physics who face similar problems but on energy and length scales differing by many orders of magnitude. Historical accident has led to different groups "owning" theoretical and computational knowledge of great sophistication, only to find that workers in other parts of physics (& chemistry!) need exactly what is known by different names and acronyms and applied to completely different systems, and can borrow and exploit this knowledge, rather than reinventing it from scratch. This requires an ongoing commitment to sharing knowledge, techniques, mathematical and computational skills, and the personal friendships and collaborations which make such sharing not only possible but highly stimulating and rewarding. Return to biographies listing
Nora Berrah Biography
Nora Berrah has been a University Distinguished Professor of Physics
at Western Michigan University since 2000. She received her PhD from
UVA in 1987 and held a postdoc and assistant scientist positions in the
physics division of ANL. Her publication list contains 2 book chapters
and more than 121 research papers. She held a Humboldt fellowship
position at the Fritz-Haber-Institut der Max Planck Gesellschaft in Berlin,
Germany, was visiting scientist at LURE, Universite` d'Orsay, France, and
is a Fellow of the American Physical Society. She has served for the APS,
DAMOP executive committee, the CISA committee, and the selection committee
for the I.I. Rabi prize. She also served in the NRC committee for CAMOS,
as chair of the scientific user executive committee for the ALS, on BESAC
for DoE, on the SAC for the LCLS, as co-team leader for AMOS at the LCLS,
and for national and international scientific conference committees.
Candidate's Statement Few-body physics and multiparticle dynamics are important in many areas of physics, and chemistry, enabling GFB to play a special role in all scientific communities. Our responsibility should be to work at finding many ways to communicate advances in these areas as well as a sense of excitement about these topics and to organize sessions at various APS ad ACS meetings. The GFB should work hard at disseminating its findings and activities to the broad scientific communities and cooperating with other topical groups and divisions of the APS and ASC. Return to biographies listing
Reinhold Blumel Biography Reinhold Blumel obtained his Ph.D. in Nuclear Physics from the Technical University in Munich in 1983. He spent his Postdoc (1984) at the Weizmann Institute working on problems in localization theory and the nonlinear dynamics of atoms and molecules. His continued research in nuclear structure physics in 1985-86 was followed by a two-year stay (1987-89) at the Max-Planck-Institute for Quantum Optics, where he worked on crystallization and melting of ion crystals in a Paul trap. In 1989-90 he continued his studies of small atoms and molecules in Bill Reinhardt's research group at the University of Pennsylvania working primarily on the chaotic helium atom. In 1990 he obtained his Habilitation (Doctor of Science) Degree in Nuclear Physics from the Technical University in Munich. In 1991 he obtained a prestigious Heisenberg scholarship (roughly equivalent to a MacArthur "genius" award), which allowed him to focus entirely on research from 1991-1993. During this time, and until 1995, he worked at the University of Delaware and the University of Maryland on ion trapping, the application of nonlinear dynamics to atoms and molecules, and on a book (with Bill Reinhardt) on "Chaos in Atomic Physics" (published by Cambridge University Press in 1997). In 1995-98 he worked as a visiting scientist at the University of Freiburg, and joined Wesleyan University in 1999. In 2000 he obtained a Presidential PECASE award. A member of DAMOP, and president of TAMOC, he was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2003. Candidate's Statement The study of few-body systems is one of the great unifying themes of science. No matter what the field, be that astronomy, astro-physics, atomic physics, chemistry, mechanics, nuclear physics, etc., a serious attempt at understanding any of these fields invariably starts with an intensive investigation of the field's canonical few-body systems. Any complex systems can be approached from two different directions, starting at the thermodynamic limit toward fewer particles, or starting at its few-body side and onward towards more and more particles. No matter how we look at it, few-body physics is a key component of understanding any natural system ranging from simple classical mechanics to (molecular) biology. I am convinced that the GFB plays a crucial role in strengthening the few-body communities in these diverse fields and to act as a hub that stimulates, informs and educates the members of our discipline no matter what specific field of science they are engaged in. Return to biographies listing
Sabine Jeschonnek Biography
Sabine Jeschonnek is currently an Assistant Professor at The Ohio State
University at Lima. She was a Postdoctoral Fellow in Jefferson Lab's
Theory Group from 1998 - 2001, and a Feodor-Lynen Fellow at MIT from
1997 - 1998. She received her Ph.D. from Bonn University in Germany in
1996.
Candidate's Statement The Few Body Topical Group provides a forum for interaction among physicists from different fields who share an interest in the many guises of the few-body system. Often, we have little opportunity to exchange ideas with colleagues from other fields. Thus, I see the GFB as a valuable enrichment. If elected, it will be my goal to increase the visibility of few-body physics by helping to organize few-body sessions at various meetings. I would also like to work with the other officers of the group to attract more members for our Topical Group, and to promote close interactions between theorists and experimentalists. Return to biographies listing
Ubirajara (Bira) van Kolck Biography Bira van Kolck is currently an Associate Professor of Physics at the University of Arizona. Bira got his Ph.D from the University of Texas at Austin in 1993, working under S. Weinberg. He held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Washington and at the California Institute of Technology, before moving to Arizona in 2000. Since then, he has been a RHIC Physics Fellow at the RIKEN BNL Research Center, a DOE Outstanding Junior Investigator, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellow. He was elected Fellow of the APS in 2004. He has participated in various committees of the APS Division of Nuclear Physics (Program, National Nuclear Physics Summer School, Home Page), and is currently a member of the APS Committee on International Scientific Affairs. In addition to other conferences and workshops, he organized the 2003 DNP Fall Meeting in Tucson (in the role of co-chair). His research interests center on effective field theories, in particular applications to few-body systems. His main contributions were to power counting, symmetries, and renormalization of few-body forces in systems with large scattering lengths and/or singular potentials. Candidate's Statement Few-body systems provide the simplest examples of complexity, and form a link between high-resolution structure and large-scale aggregation. Precise experiment and controlled theory can reinforce each other as perhaps nowhere else in physics. It has been recognized for a long time that researchers in the GFB share many of the techniques ---such as the hyperspherical method--- used in the analyses of few-body systems. Even more importantly, many of the few-body features are remarkably universal and cut across physics subfields. Examples from my own experience include the three-body dynamics of systems (such as the triton and the 4He molecular trimer) with large two-body scattering lengths, and the description of two-body systems with attractive, inverse-power potentials (such as pion exchange and van der Waals forces). Many of these universal features shape the behavior of many-body systems (for example, Bose-Einstein condensates near a Feshbach resonance), and the transition is increasingly amenable to study with computational methods (e.g., the nuclear no-core shell model). GFB should continue to foster interdisciplinary communication and collaboration on few-body physics, while striving to strengthen the interface with the many-body community. Return to biographies listing |
