Prof. Baruch Meerson

The Hebrew University of Jerusalem The Racah Institute of Physics Jerusalem 91904, Israel meerson_at_cc.huji.ac.il +972 2 658 4470 +972 2 658 4396

CV and publication list

Research Interests: Physics Far From Equilibrium

Large fluctuations in stochastic populations

Clustering, pattern formation and phase separation in granular flows

Phase transition kinetics

Novel aspects of Ostwald ripening

Self-similarity and dynamic scaling

Nonlinear fluid dynamics and plasma theory

Fractal coarsening

How long will it take for an isolated population (of molecules, bacteria, animals or even people) to die out? Here are some of our recent papers - 1, 2 and 3 - on this kind of problems.

Is there anything in common between a bunch of marbles and an expanding universe? Take a look at our paper on clustering in a freely cooling granular gas.

You can also watch movies showing a novel phase separation instability and fluctuations-dominated dynamics in a simple model of fluidized granular medium, as seen in molecular dynamics simulations. Here is one of our papers on this subject.

One more fascinating granular phenomenon that we have worked on is granular levitation , when a heavy close-packed granular cluster is supported from below by a dilute granular gas. Here is our paper on the theory and simulations of this system.

You can also watch a Flash Movie 6.0 (1.2 Mb.) of experiment (by I. Aranson et al.) showing Ostwald ripening far from equilibrium: coarsening of granular clusters in electrostatically-driven metallic powders. Here is our paper on a theory of this process.

What is fractal coarsening? It is shape relaxation of fractal objects by surface tension or another "fractality spoiler". Enjoy a small animation, or a larger-scale movie of the diffusion-controlled coarsening of a DLA cluster, as seen in numerical simulations. Here is our pioneering work on this subject. Now we are beginning to understand the reasons behind complexity of this and related systems, see this paper.

Here is my group in Jerusalem:

Senior research associate:

• Dr. Arkady Vilenkin

Ph.D. student:

• Michael Assaf

Master's student:

• Itamar Kolvin

Undergraduate research student:

• Yuval Simons

I expect to have a postdoc opening beginning on October 1 2010. Here is the ad

My former research students (master's and/or doctoral) and postdocs:

Gil Cohen, Miriam Deutsch, Efi Efrati, Itzhak Fouxon, Boaz Giron, Dmitri Kaganovich, Evgeniy Khain, Yair Kurzweil, Jacob Levin, Azi Lipshtat, Ephraim Megged,
Igor Mitkov, Avner Peleg, Nathan Persky, Igor Rogachevskii, Guy Shinar, Yoav Tsori, Shalom Yariv .

The courses I am teaching in 2009-2010:

• Equations of Mathematical Physics (No. 77313, semester 1, syllabus in Hebrew)

• Nonlinear Dynamics of Continuous Media (No. 77728, semester 2, syllabus)

• Dynamical Systems and Chaos (No. 77368, semester 2, syllabus)

I organized an international workshop "Giant Fluctuations in Population Dynamics" in Leiden, the Netherlands.

My previous research interests

embraced a broad variety of subjects in nonlinear and non-equilirium physics, plasma theory, etc. Among them was the discovery in 1979 (together with E.A. Oks and P.V. Sasorov) of chaos in highly-excited (Rydberg) atoms driven by an oscillating electric field.

When I was a student of physics,

two great physicists, Lev Landau and Richard Feynman, were my heroes. Here are portraits of Lev Landau and Richard Feynman, painted by Nataly Meerson.