About Me
Our research area is non-equilibrium statistical mechanics, with a focus on atypically large fluctuations. Rare large fluctuations are important in many situations: from a sudden extinction event in a long-lived population of animals to a rare large peak in the height of a growing surface, and to an unusual trajectory of the first among myriads of sperm cells, competing with each other for reaching the oocyte. A group of projects is aimed at developing and implementing an efficient description of a broad class of stochastic processes which uses an approximation method akin to geometrical optics. The work on these challenging frontline subjects involves a combination of analytical methods of theoretical physics and applied mathematics and numerical simulations.
My previous research interests embraced a broad variety of subjects in nonlinear, non-equilirium and statistical physics. Among them was the discovery in 1979 of chaos in highly-excited (Rydberg) atoms driven by an oscillating electric field. I made this discovery, together with E.A. Oks and P.V. Sasorov, shortly after defending my Ph.D. thesis. Here is our 1979 paper. This was one of the pioneering works defining the field of quantum chaos.
In 2012, I was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society. I left the APS in 2021.
When I was a student, two great physicists, Lev Landau and Richard Feynman, were my heroes. Here are portraits of Lev Landau and Richard Feynman, painted by Nataly Meerson. Here is the online gallery of Nataly. Nataly also painted my own portrait that is displayed on this webpage.
