Eric J. Heller

Last updated

Eric J. Heller
Ericjheller.jpg
Eric Heller (2005)
Born (1946-01-10) January 10, 1946 (age 78)
NationalityAmerican
Alma mater Harvard University
Known for Quantum scars
AwardsNational Academy of Sciences (2006), American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry (2005).
Scientific career
Fields Theoretical Chemistry
Physics
Institutions Harvard, UCLA, Los Alamos National Laboratory, University of Washington
Doctoral advisor William P. Reinhardt

Eric Johnson "Rick" Heller (born January 10, 1946) is the Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Harvard University. Heller is known for his work on time-dependent quantum mechanics, and also for producing digital art based on the results of his numerical calculations.

Contents

Early life and education

Heller's father was the economist Walter Heller, architect of the first tax cut motivated by fiscal policy, under John F Kennedy.

Heller received his BS from the University of Minnesota in 1968, and his PhD in Chemical Physics in 1973 from Harvard University, where he worked with William Reinhardt. Heller was a postdoc at the University of Chicago with Stuart Rice, after which he joined the faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Career

Heller was a member of the Chemistry faculty at UCLA from 1976 to 1982. In 1981, Heller took a sabbatical at Los Alamos National Laboratory and then stayed on as a staff scientist until 1984 when he accepted a faculty position in Chemistry at the University of Washington. In 1993, Heller returned to Harvard as Professor of Physics and director of the Institute for Theoretical Atomic and Molecular Physics (ITAMP) (1993–1998). In 1998, Heller stepped down as ITAMP director to assume a joint appointment to the Harvard University Chemistry department. His present position is Abbott and James Lawrence Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Physics at Harvard University.

Heller is an elected member of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science, [1] the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the American Philosophical Society. Heller has received the American Chemical Society Award in Theoretical Chemistry (2005), the Astor Fellowship at Oxford (2005) and the Joseph O. Hirschfelder Prize (2003). Heller has been a Sloan Fellow, a Humboldt Fellow, a fellow of the American Physical Society, and a Guggenheim Fellow, and is the coauthor of over 280 publications.

Research

Heller pioneered a time-dependent wavepacket picture of quantum mechanics, which allowed the excited-state dynamics of large quantum mechanical systems to be understood without calculating eigenstates. Heller's work laid the foundations for a theoretical understanding of femtochemistry. He and postdoc Soo-ying Lee developed the time-dependent approach to resonance Raman spectroscopy. [1] [2] [3] [4] Heller has also made contributions to methodology, suggesting the technique called "frozen Gaussians"—today the most widely used semiclassical initial value representation (IVR) method of wavepacket propagation.

In physics, Heller is known for his work on quantum chaos, particularly on scar theory. Heller's more recent work has focused on the study of two dimensional electron gases, quantum mirages in quantum corrals, scattering theory, few-body quantum mechanics, semiclassical methods, and freak waves in the ocean. Many (though not all) of these studies make use of the time-dependent quantum mechanics ideas from his earlier work.

Publications

Heller published a book called Why You Hear What You Hear on acoustics and psychoacoustics (Princeton, 2013). Ostensibly a textbook, it contains many new perspectives on acoustics, including of musical instruments and voice. The psychoacoustics of pitch perception forms the longest chapter.

In June, 2018 a second book authored by Heller was published by Princeton University Press. Called The Semiclassical Way (to dynamics and spectroscopy), it is about quantum mechanics and classical mechanics and exploiting the computationally useful and helpfully intuitive connections between them. It shares a foundation with Why You Hear What You Hear in that both books are about understanding wave phenomena.

Heller is mentioned in the Nebula Award winning novel The Quantum Rose by Catherine Asaro, a science fiction novel based in part on Heller's theories. Asaro, who was a student of Heller's, dedicated the book to him and her other two mentors, Alex Dalgarno and Kate Kirby. [5]

Related Research Articles

Quantum chemistry, also called molecular quantum mechanics, is a branch of physical chemistry focused on the application of quantum mechanics to chemical systems, particularly towards the quantum-mechanical calculation of electronic contributions to physical and chemical properties of molecules, materials, and solutions at the atomic level. These calculations include systematically applied approximations intended to make calculations computationally feasible while still capturing as much information about important contributions to the computed wave functions as well as to observable properties such as structures, spectra, and thermodynamic properties. Quantum chemistry is also concerned with the computation of quantum effects on molecular dynamics and chemical kinetics.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Theoretical chemistry</span> Branch of chemistry

Theoretical chemistry is the branch of chemistry which develops theoretical generalizations that are part of the theoretical arsenal of modern chemistry: for example, the concepts of chemical bonding, chemical reaction, valence, the surface of potential energy, molecular orbitals, orbital interactions, and molecule activation.

Stuart Alan Rice is an American theoretical chemist and physical chemist. He is well known as a theoretical chemist who also does experimental research, having spent much of his career working in multiple areas of physical chemistry. He is currently the Frank P. Hixon Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at the University of Chicago. During his tenure at the University of Chicago, Rice has trained more than 100 Ph.D. students and postdoctoral researchers. He received the National Medal of Science in 1999.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Nicholas C. Handy</span> British chemist (1941-2012)

Nicholas Charles Handy was a British theoretical chemist. He retired as Professor of quantum chemistry at the University of Cambridge in September 2004.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Martin Karplus</span> Austrian-born American theoretical chemist

Martin Karplus is an Austrian and American theoretical chemist. He is the Director of the Biophysical Chemistry Laboratory, a joint laboratory between the French National Center for Scientific Research and the University of Strasbourg, France. He is also the Theodore William Richards Professor of Chemistry, emeritus at Harvard University. Karplus received the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, together with Michael Levitt and Arieh Warshel, for "the development of multiscale models for complex chemical systems".

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Clary</span> British theoretical chemist

Sir David Charles Clary, FRS is a British theoretical chemist. He was president of Magdalen College, Oxford, from 2005 to 2020. He was the first chief scientific adviser to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office from 2009 to 2013. He is a Professor of Chemistry at the University of Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Dalgarno</span> British physicist and father of molecular astrophysics

Alexander Dalgarno FRS was a British physicist who was a Phillips Professor of Astronomy at Harvard University.

Edwin Crawford Kemble was an American physicist who made contributions to the theory of quantum mechanics and molecular structure and spectroscopy. During World War II, he was a consultant to the Navy on acoustic detection of submarines and to the Army on Operation Alsos.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Ronnie Kosloff</span>

Ronnie Kosloff is a professor of theoretical chemistry at the Institute of Chemistry and Fritz Haber Center for Molecular Dynamics, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Debashis Mukherjee</span> Indian theoretical chemist

Debashis Mukherjee is a theoretical chemist, well known for his research in the fields of molecular many body theory, theoretical spectroscopy, finite temperature non-perturbative many body theories. Mukherjee has been the first to develop and implement a class of many-body methods for electronic structure which are now standard works in the field. These methods, collectively called multireference coupled cluster formalisms, are versatile and powerful methods for predicting with quantitative accuracy the energetics and cross-sections of a vast range of molecular excitations and ionization. A long-standing problem of guaranteeing proper scaling of energy for many electron wave-functions of arbitrary complexity has also been first resolved by him. He has also been the first to develop a rigorously size-extensive state-specific multi-reference coupled cluster formalism, and its perturbative counterpart which is getting increasingly recognized as a very promising methodological advance.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">S. M. Blinder</span> American academic

Seymour Michael Blinder is a professor emeritus of chemistry and physics at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and a remote working senior scientist with Wolfram Research in Champaign, Illinois.

Kizhakeyil Lukose Sebastian is a professor of chemistry at the department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry of Indian Institute of Technology, Palakkad, India. Prior to becoming a professor at IIT Palakkad, he was a professor of chemistry at the department of Inorganic and Physical Chemistry at Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, for about 20 years.

Edgar Bright Wilson Jr. was an American chemist.

Eric R. Bittner is a theoretical chemist, physicist, and distinguished professor of chemical physics at the University of Houston.

Mark Sheard Child FRS is a British chemist, and Emeritus Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Donald Truhlar</span> American chemist

Donald Gene Truhlar is an American scientist working in theoretical and computational chemistry and chemical physics with special emphases on quantum mechanics and chemical dynamics.

Shaul Mukamel is a chemist and physicist, currently serving as a Distinguished Professor at the University of California, Irvine. He is known for his works in non linear optics and spectroscopy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bidyendu Mohan Deb</span> Indian chemist (born 1942)

Bidyendu Mohan Deb is an Indian theoretical chemist, chemical physicist and a professor at the Indian Institute of Science Education and Research, Kolkata (IISER). he is known for his studies in theoretical chemistry and chemical physics. He is an elected fellow of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, The World Academy of Sciences, Indian National Science Academy and the Indian Academy of Sciences. The Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, the apex agency of the Government of India for scientific research, awarded him the Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology, one of the highest Indian science awards, in 1981, for his contributions to chemical sciences.

Andreas Christoph Albrecht was an American physical chemist.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">David Tannor</span>

David Joshua Tannor is a theoretical chemist, who is the Hermann Mayer Professorial Chair in the department of chemical physics at the Weizmann Institute of Science.

References

  1. 1 2 "International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science". www.iaqms.org. Retrieved September 9, 2019.
  2. ↑ Lee, Soo-Y.; Heller, E. J. (1979). "Time-dependent theory of Raman scattering". The Journal of Chemical Physics. 71 (12): 4777. Bibcode:1979JChPh..71.4777L. doi:10.1063/1.438316.
  3. ↑ Heller, Eric J. (1981). "The semiclassical way to molecular spectroscopy". Accounts of Chemical Research. 14 (12): 368–375. doi:10.1021/ar00072a002. ISSN   0001-4842. S2CID   67847004.
  4. ↑ Myers, Anne B. (1997). "'Time-Dependent' Resonance Raman Theory". Journal of Raman Spectroscopy. 28 (6): 389–401. Bibcode:1997JRSp...28..389M. doi:10.1002/(sici)1097-4555(199706)28:6<389::aid-jrs128>3.0.co;2-m. ISSN   1097-4555.
  5. ↑ The Quantum Rose, Catherine Asaro, Tor Books, 2000
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.