Biosketch
In the 1960s Swinney’s research as a PhD student and subsequently as a postdoc at Johns Hopkins University was on critical phenomena in fluids. He held faculty appointments at New York University (1971-73), City College of New York (1973-78), and the University of Texas at Austin (1978-). In studies of systems driven away from thermodynamic equilibrium, Swinney and his collaborators have observed, developed, or discovered: a transition to chaos in fluid flows in various geometries; a laboratory model of Jupiter’s Great Red Spot; anomalous diffusion and Lévy flights in geostrophic flows; spatial patterns in chemical systems, as predicted by Turing; localized structures (“oscillons”) in oscillating granular materials; methods for determining the largest Lyapunov exponent and Shannon’s mutual information in chaotic systems; the same fractal dimension (1.7) of edges of some leaves, flowers, dendrites, viscous fingers, and bacterial colonies; a protein that is lethal to Paenibacillus dendritiformis bacteria; fluctuations in the number N of swimming bacteria in a fixed volume are proportional to N^(3/4) rather than to N^(1/2) as in thermal equilibrium; a resonance in oceanic internal waves selects the angle of continental slopes (about 3 degrees); crystallites appear in sheared random packings of spheres when the volume fraction reaches 0.646+-0.001 (random close packing).
Research Interests
Crystallization onset and the growth of crystallites are being studied for hard spheres under periodic shear.
Membership Type
Member
Election Year
1992
Primary Section
Section 33: Applied Physical Sciences
Secondary Section
Section 13: Physics