Joseph Rudnick
Professor Emeritus
TEP
Office: Knudsen 2-240 C
Phone: 310-825-8535
Email:
Website
Educational Background
Ph.D., UC San Diego, 1970
Research Interest
I do research on a variety of problems in condensed matter physics. My primary interests are in the general field of
statistical mechanics. Following are some of the areas in which I've done research in the past few years.
- Polymers and random walks: I have looked at some properties of chain polymers, as modeled by the ordinary and
self-avoiding random walk. Among these are the shapes and winding angle distributions of randomly coiled polymers.
- Statistical mechanics of finite systems: I have been interested in the properties of finite systems near the bulk
critical point. General strategies for the calculation of the behavior of such systems has been worked out, but there
are interesting cases in which new approaches must be developed. I have worked out one such case - percolation on a
finite lattice - and am looking at others.
- Textures and domain shapes in two dimensional systems: The interplay of bulk and surface properties in two dimensional
systems - exemplified by Langmuir monolayers - leads to interesting results. I have been involved in a project the purpose
of which is to understand the shapes taken by liquid-condensed domains in Langmuir-Blodgett films. This work is in
collaboration with Professor Bruinsma.
- Electrolyte solutions: I have recently done work in collaboration with Professor Andrea Liu of the UCLA Department of
Chemistry on the properties of electrolyte solutions. We have developed an approach that unifies the Debye-Huckel
approximation with the standard field theoretical method. This method has been generalized so that we can also explore
the effect of various parameters on the stiffness of polyelectrolytes and other important aspects of electrolyte behavior.
- Other projects: I have also collaborated with Professor Chakravarty on aspects of dissipative quantum tunneling and with
Professor Kivelson on frustrated phase transitions. See their research descriptions.
Selected Publications
- Percolation and the Mysteries of Replication, J. Rudnick, in Random Magnetism High Temperature Superconductivity (World
Scientific, Singapore, 1994), W.P. Beyerman, N.L. Huang-Liu and D.E. Maclaughlin, eds.
- Dissipative dynamics of a two-state system, the Kondo problem, and the inverse-square Ising Model, S. Chakravarty and
J. Rudnick, Phys. Rev. Lett. 75, 501 (1995).
- Shape of domains in two-dimensional systems: virtual singularities and a generalized Wulff construction, J. Rudnick and
R. Bruinsma, Phys. Rev. Lett. 74 2491 (1995).