Subject: Fwd: The University of Poznan
Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2008 12:28:25 EDT
OK many thanks again! This is the positive side of things from Kerry Pendergast, and very suitable for a scientific biography.
Dear Myron,
Please find below the latest page of Crystal Spheres.
Myron’s Aberystwyth Research Group.      Myron returned to Aberystwyth from Wolfson College Oxford with a Ramsay Memorial Fellowship from 1976 to 1978 and a SERC Advanced Fellowship from 1978 to 1983.  In these years Myron established his chemical physics research group with Gareth Evans, Colin Reid and Mauro Ferrario, together with visitors Ahmed Hasanein, Jozef Moscicki and Barbara Janik. This group would bring together the three strands of research which were needed to define how the photon visualized by Einstein in his Nobel Prize winning explanation of the photoelectric electric, interacted with atoms and molecules to cause rotations, oscillations, vibrations and translations in real time on photon by photon collisions with molecules causing an evolution of the motion of the molecules, which could be tracked using frame by frame analysis against time. The three strands came from the dielectric research pioneered independently and cooperatively in Aberystwyth by Professor Mansel Davies and in Poznan by Kielich andPiekara over several decades, combined with far infra red studies at Aberystwyth and computer simulations inspired by workers at the Universities of Nancy and Nice. New impetus with the simulations would also be injected by Italian workers giving important insights into the work. So Myron’s research group would be able to develop multinational research links between Italy, France, Poland and the United Kingdom. In particular the use of a pulsed laser supplied to the group by the Science Research Council would provide the rich source of photons that had not been previously available for such studies. Aberystwyth and Poznan had brought into being and pioneered the new field in physics of non linear optics and this collaboration would be able to greatly develop this ground breaking work in ways that would reveal the secrets of the enigmatic photon!       At the turn of the twentieth century, electric lighting was becoming common place and there was a need to produce the most efficient light bulbs possible. The job of researching this problem was given to the great German physicist Max Planck. Hitherto, it was believed that light rays were continuous, but Planck recognized there were problems in the Maxwell-Heaviside equations relating to this and found calculations could be made more physical by imagining the ray to be composed of a string of ‘bullets’ (quanta) called photons. This explained why hot objects did not radiate at all frequencies, but only at frequencies for which energy is available as quanta.      In 1905 Einstein explained the photoelectric effect by accepting light rays really were made up of particles called photons. This work gave Einstein belatedly, the 1921 Nobel Prize for Physics and opened new areas of chemistry and physics for study. Einstein’s photons were soon used to explain how the emission spectra of atoms could be related to the positions of each atom in the periodic table. This work was pioneered from a chemical viewpoint in Aberystwyth by Charles R Bury and a physics viewpoint by Neils Bohr at Manchester and led to the Bury-Bohr model of the atom. This work also gave Bohr the 1922 Nobel Prize for Physics. When high frequency high energy photons collide with electrons in atoms, they can eject electrons completely out of the atom and at lower frequencies in the infra red cause atoms in molecules to vibrate as found in infra red spectroscopy and used in chemical analysis. At even lower frequencies in the far infra red, radiation sources and detectors are not very efficient, making this type of spectroscopy difficult and so was left for a few specialized groups in the world to research. Preeminent amongst these groups was Mansel Davies’s team in Aberystwyth which forged links with Professors Kielich andPiekara groupin Poland’s Poznan University to work on dielectric theory.         Peter Debye made a major contribution to chemical physics from 1912 by applying the concept of dipole moments to the charge distribution in molecules. Debye relaxation is the dielectric relaxation response of an ideal noninteracting population of dipoles to an alternating external field.  Mansel Davies worked from 1954 to 1975, on the introduction of dielectric loss and relaxation as a means of probing molecular behavior. Meanwhile Arkadiusz Piekara at the University of Poznan was working along similar lines and establishing his own research team.  Professor Arkadiusz Henryk Piekara (1904 - 1989),was interested in the physics of dielectrics and optical nonlinear phenomena. After the war he worked as a professor in Gdansk before becoming a professor in Poznan in 1952.  Kerry