Professor
Department Chair
My recent research interests have been in the area of breakdown phenomena in disordered materials, e.g. brittle fracture, electrical breakdown, and the critical current in superconductors. Most recently, we have studied the crossover from tough to brittle fracture in heterogeneous and composite materials by both analytic and numerical simulation techniques. I have also explored the role of vortex line creation at defects and their subsequent motion on the behavior near the critical current in superconducting arrays of Josephson junctions. For many years, I have also been interested in phenomena near percolation threshold, where rigidity fails and the elastic constants go to zero even though the material is still connected. Also, I have plans to work again on phonons and spin wave excitations in disordered materials.
Revised September 28, 1995