David Peak

Professor - Assistant Department Head
Employed at USU 1994
BS (1965) SUNY New Paltz
PhD (1969) SUNY Albany
Research Interests:
Telephone #: (435) 797-2884
E-mail address: peakd@cc.usu.edu

Biographical sketch

Prior to coming to Utah State in 1994, Dr. Peak had taught for twenty years at Union College, a private liberal arts college in upstate New York. There he was the Frank and Marie Louise Bailey Professor of Physics. His other academic and research positions include Research Associate at Princeton University, Visiting Scientist at Argonne National Laboratory, Faculty Research Associate at NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, and the E. Clairborne Robins Distinguished University Professor in Science at Richmond University. Long an advocate for research done by undergraduates, Peak was a founding member of the Council on Undergraduate Research and a charter member of the Governing Board of the National Conferences on Undergraduate Research. Among his activities at USU, he is co-director of the University's Get Away Special Program and its NSF-REU program in Nonlinear Dynamics. His refereed publications include 12 undergraduate co-authors. For his research accomplishments at Union, Peak was awarded the 1996 American Physical Society's Prize for Research by a Faculty Member at an Undergraduate Institution.

Research interests

Dr. Peak's research has roamed over the physics landscape. He has publications in quantum field theory, nonequilibrium statistical mechanics, radiation effects in solids, chemical physics, the mechanical properties of granular materials, and nonlinear dynamics. A number of his earlier papers concentrated on the effects of spatial correlations on the course of kinetic processes in condensed media. These included studies of the production, distribution, and annihilation of point defects in solids under irradiation, the kinetics of condensed phase nucleation, and the origin of nonlinear concentration dependences in fluorescence yield experiments.

More recently, Peak has been working on various aspects of the application of chaos and fractals to physical phenomena. In one set of investigations, he and his students have been examining the mechanical response of low density powders in low speed collisions. The motivation for this work is the question of how large solid bodies formed from microscopic dust grains in the early solar nebula, in particular, how fluffy, fractal-like grain aggregates are processed into bodies with solid densities. Other ongoing research includes: the detection of determinism in erratic signals using optimal clustering techniques and symbolic dynamics and the control of stochastically excited dynamical systems (both of which are in collaboration with faculty and students in electrical engineering), simulation of the foraging dynamics of mule deer (in collaboration with faculty and students in natural resources), understanding the dynamics of aging in terms of recurrent neural networks, self-organized criticality, and various other cellular automata-like models, and the emergence of complexity and its relation to the second law of thermodynamics in adaptive cellular automata.

Dr. Peak is also interested in contemporary physics education research and the related issue of concept mastery. His own efforts in these areas include a textbook--Chaos Under Control(Freeman, 1994, with M. Frame)--written for general students with little mathematical preparation, on the principles and applications of fractals and chaos in the sciences and the arts, and the development of a complete set of multimedia laboratory exercises for the introductory, university physics course.

Books

Chaos Under Control: The Art and Science of Complexity (W.H. Freeman and Co., New York, 1994) (with Michael Frame)

Komplexitat: das gezhmte Chaos (Birkaser Verlag, Basel, Switzerland , 1995) (with Michael Frame and Anita Ehlers, translator)

Selected publications

*-indicates undergraduate

"Influences of Thermal Spikes in Ion Beam Mixing," Nuc. Instr. and Meth. in Phys. Res. B 7/8, 561 (1985) (with R.S. Averback).

"An Evaluation of Charge Effects on the Quenching of Tryptophan Fluorescence in Small Peptides by Iodide Ion," Photochem. Photobiol. 42, 25 (1985) (with T.C. Werner and J.L. Danziger*).

"Effect of Projectile Energy, Specimen Temperature and Fast Thermal Diffusing Atoms on Ion Beam Mixing," Applied Phys. A 38, 139 (1985) (with R.S. Averback).

"Ion Beam Mixing in Pure and in Immiscible Copper Bilayer Systems," Applied Phys. A 39, 59 (1986) (with R.S. Averback and L.J. Thompson).

"Hydrogen on Semiconductor Surfaces," in Amorphous Hydrides, ed. by G. Bambakidis, R.C. Bowman, and R.P. Griessen (Plenum Press, New York, 1986), pp. 61-79 (with J.W. Corbett, S.J. Pearton, and A.G. Sganga).

"Formation Kinetics of Thermal Donors in Silicon," Mater. Res. Soc. Symp. Proc. 59, 173 (1986) (with J.T. Borenstein and J.W. Corbett).

"On the Kinetics of Thermal Donor Formation in Silicon," J. Mater. Res. 1, 527 (1986) (with J.T. Borenstein and J.W. Corbett).

"Thermal Spike and Defect Effects in Ion Mixing," in Ion Mixing and Surface Alloying II, ed. by M-A. Nicolet, D. Follstaedt, and R.S. Averback (Sandia, Albuquerque, NM, 1986), pp. 12-19.

"Ion Beam Mixing at ow Temperatures Studied with Marker Atoms Using .3-1 MeV Kr," in Ion Mixing and Surface Alloying II, ed. by M-A. Nicolet, D. Follstaedt, and R.S. Averback (Sandia, Albuquerque, NM, 1986), pp. 20-31 (with S.-J. Kim*, B.M. Paine, M-A. Nicolet, and R.S. Averback).

"Low-Temperature Ion Beam Mixing in Metals," Phys. Rev. B 37, 38 (1988) (with S.-J. Kim*, M-A. Nicolet, and R.S. Averback).

"Ion Beam Mixing in Ag-Pd Alloys," Appl. Phys. Lett. 55, 1295 (1989) (with J.L. Klatt and R.S. Averback).

"Spatial Correlations in Condensed Phase Reactions," Rad. Effects 111&112, 309 (1989).

"Pair Correlation Kinetics," Phys. Rev. 41, 5362 (1990) (with D.C. Greenlaw* and L.A. Schick*).

"Analysis of Experiments in Helium Microbeam Mixing," Mater. Res. Soc. Symp. Proc. 235, 503 (1992) (with J.B. Davis and R.E. Benenson).

"Metric Universality of Order in One-Dimensional Dynamics," J. Bifurcation and Chaos 3, 567 (1993) (with M. Frame).

"Scaling Symmetries in Nonlinear Dynamics: A View from Parameter Space," Physica D 81, 23 (1995) (with H. Hurwitz and M. Frame).

"Order and Chaos: Art and Magic -- A First College Course in Quantitative Reasoning Based on Fractals and Chaos," (with M. Frame) preprint

"Universal Response of Granular Targets to Low Velocity Impact," (with B.D. Donn, E. Fullar*, and S.J. Kusiak*) preprint

"Taming Chaos in the Wild: A Model-free Technique for Wildlife Population Control,"  in Wildlife and Landscape Ecology: Effects of Pattern and Scale, J. Bissonnette, ed., Springer-Verlag, New York, 1997