Research

A complex nucleus is a great example of a mesoscopic system, in between the microscopic and macroscopic worlds, with a wealth of problems typical for both. There is a rich interplay between many strongly interacting particles, with its "average" or mean-field structure, vibrations and rotations, collective waves, superconducting pairing, fundamental symmetries and their violations, as well as complicated decays and reactions. The interactions bring in chaotic motion and thermalization with no external heat bath. Apart from obvious technological and medical applications, we are now on the way to quantum informatics where nuclear analogs are very useful.

Biography

I received my high education at Moscow State University, then post-graduate at Kurchatov Center of Nuclear Physics (Moscow) and at the Budker Institute (Novosibirsk) where I remained for many years, becoming Head of the Theory Division and Head of Theoretical Physics at Novosibirsk State University. I moved to Michigan State University in 1992. You can read more about mu life and career path in this recent article. My research interests are in many-body quantum physics.

How students can contribute as part of my research team

There are very promising directions of future research: collective motion in weakly-bound nuclei, alpha correlations along with normal pairing, quantum chaos, symmetries and their violation, and nuclear reactions as prototypes for quantum-information processes.

Textbooks

• 2-volume textbook "Quantum Physics" was published by "Wiley" in 2011
• Textbook "Physics of Atomic Nuclei" (together with Alexander Volya) was published by "Wiley" in 2017

Scientific publications

• Nuclear level density, thermalization, chaos and collectivity. V. Zelevinsky and M. Horoi, Progress in Particle and Nuclear Physics 105, 180 (2019).
• Quantum chaos and thermalization in isolated systems of interacting particles. F. Borgonovi, F.M. Izrailev, L.F. Santos, and V.Zelevinsky. Physics Reports 626, 1 (2016)
• Super-radiant dynamics, doorways, and resonances in nuclei and other open mesoscopic systems, N. Auerbach and V. Zelevinsky, Rep. Prog. Phys. 74, 106301 (2011)
• Mesoscopic Nuclear Physics, Alexander Volya and Vladimir Zelevinsky, World Scientific (2023)