SCOT SHAW
Harvard University Department of Physics
Jefferson Laboratory 351
Cambridge, MA 02138

(617) 495 - 2867

shaw@physics.harvard.edu

Overview

I am a graduate student in Physics at Harvard University, and a member of the Eric Heller research group. The work of this group falls under the broad rubric of theoretical atomic, molecular, and optical physics; I work in two-dimensional mesoscopic physics. My work involves a significant amount of computation. I am also the systems administrator for our group's DEC and Alpha/Linux workstations.

Research

My work has been largely on the propagation of electrons through the mesoscopic systems found in two-dimensional electron gas (2DEG) experiments. I have been specifically concerned with the effects of the smooth disordered potential present in such systems. The numerical methods needed to treat systems with smooth disorder are more demanding of computational resources than methods for systems with more simplified assumptions, so there is a strong incentive to make the assumptions that I've avoided.

This work has been in collaboration with the members of the Westervelt experimental group at Harvard. They have developed methods to probe the spatial pattern of electron flow in 2DEGs, opening up new realms for the comparison of theory and experiment. The collaboration resulted in several papers, listed in my CV.

This work has lead me into considerations of classical dynamics over smooth potentials as well, and I am becoming more interested in issues of chaotic dynamics in open systems (as opposed to the usually considered closed systems).

Other research in my graduate studies has looked at the effect of smooth potentials in closed systems. I've worked with discrete variable representation (DVR) techniques for finding eigenfunctions of arbitrary smooth potentials. Here my interest was the transition in energy level statistics from those of integrable systems to those of chaotic systems as the disorder is introduced.

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