Physics Department Faculty:
David R. Nelson
Professor of Physics and Applied PhysicsArthur K. Solomon Professor of Biophysics
PhD 1975, Cornell University
David Nelson's research focuses on collective effects in the physics and chemistry of condensed matter. He has been interested, in particular, in the interplay between fluctuations, geometry and statistical mechanics. In collaboration with his Harvard colleague, Bertrand I. Halperin, he is responsible for a theory of dislocation-mediated melting in two dimensions. The prediction of Halperin and Nelson of a fourth "hexatic" phase of matter, interposed between the usual solid and liquid phases, has now been confirmed in experiments on thin films and bulk liquid crystals. Nelson's research includes a theory of the structure and statistical mechanics of metallic glasses and investigations of "tethered surfaces", which are two-dimensional generalizations of linear polymer chains. These fishnet-like structures exhibit a remarkable low temperature flat phase upon cooling. Nelson has also studied the flux line entanglement in the new, high temperature superconductors. At high magnetic fields, thermal fluctuations cause regular arrays of flux lines to melt into a tangled spaghetti state. The physics of this melted flux liquid has important implications for many of the proposed applications of these new materials. His current interests include vortex physics, the statistical mechanics of polymers, topological defects on frozen topographies and biophysics.
- D.R. Nelson and B.I. Halperin, "Dislocation-mediated melting in two dimensions." Phys. Rev. B 19: 2457 (1979).
- D.R. Nelson, "Order frustration and defects in liquids and glasses." Phys. Rev. B 28: 5515 (1983).
- D.R. Nelson and L. Peliti, "Fluctuations in membranes with crystalline and hexatic order." Journal de Physique 48: 1085 (1987).
- D.R. Nelson, "Vortex entanglement in high temperature superconductors." Phys. Rev. Lett. 60: 1973 (1988).
- D.R. Nelson and V. Vinokur, "Boson localization and correlated pinning of superconducting vortex arrays." Phys. Rev. B 48: 13060 (1993).
- N. Hatano and D.R. Nelson, "Vortex pinning and non-Hermitian quantum mechanics." Phys. Rev. B 56: 8651 (1997).
- D.R. Nelson and N. Shnerb, "Non-Hermitian localization and population biology." Phys. Rev. E 58: 1383 (1998).
- D. Lubensky and D.R. Nelson, "Single molecule statistics and the polynucleotide unzipping transition," Phys. Rev. E 65, 03917 (2002).