Ground Control to Niels Bohr

Kyle requested that I post some stuff about my research. I'll start with an expository article of mine that recently got published that covers the work of a team of mathematicians, physicists, chemists, and engineers that includes several people from Caltech and Georgia Tech. (One of the Caltech people is Mole Shane Ross '98, who a couple of you probably know.)

The article I wrote (with Predrag Cvitanovic), "Ground Control to Niels Bohr: Exploring Outer Space with Atomic Physics, appeared in the October 2005 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, which is the AMS's analog to Physics Today. (It's a bit more technical, but the articles are supposed to be expository and many of them actually are.) My article has a few equations, so it's not at the level of a popular scientific article, but it is still pretty digestable. If you want a popular exposition, the MathTrek section of Science News Online summarized our expository piece and the work it describes.

This particular article covers a very nice example of the applied math mantra that "the same equations have the same solutions". In particular, there is something called a transition state that originally comes from chemistry (or atomic & molecular physics, if you prefer). Suppose you have a reaction taking place. Really, there is some in-between state (called a transition state) that is passed along the way (or that may not be passed for trajectories that don't react). On one side of it, you have reactants and on another side, you have products. On the celestial scale, the difference is what the reactants and products represent physically (two different types of orbits, for instance).

Obviously, there is a lot more detail even at the expository level, but that's a brief blurb to whet your appetite (or to scare you away).