William H. Miller

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William H. Miller

William Hughes Miller (born March 16, 1941 in Kosciusko , Attala County , Mississippi ) is an American chemist , known for theoretical work on the quantum theory of chemical reactions.

Live and act

Miller graduated from the Georgia Institute of Technology ( bachelor's degree in 1963) and from Harvard University with a master's degree. With Edgar Bright Wilson he was in 1967 with the work Part I: Lower bounds to eigenvalues. Part II: Theory of resonances in scattering and the relation to the decay of a prepared state doctorate . As a post-doctoral student he was a NATO Fellow at the University of Freiburg and a Junior Fellow at Harvard in 1968/69 . From 1969 to 1974 he was in the chemistry department at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (as principal investigator ) and from 1974 professor at the University of California, Berkeley . 1989 to 1993 he was head of the Faculty of Chemistry; he is also the Kenneth S. Pitzer Professor of Chemistry . Miller was among other things visiting scholar at Cambridge ( Churchill College 1975/76) and Oxford (1993 as Christensen Fellow). He is an honorary professor at Shandong University in China.

In 2007 he received the Welch Award in Chemistry for fundamental work in the modern theory of the dynamics of chemical reactions and reaction rates. He developed a semiclassical theory of inelastic and reactive scattering processes of molecules (classic S-matrix theory) and, based on this, an S-matrix variant of Kohn's variation method for calculating reaction rates from quantum mechanics. With his theory he was able to describe typical quantum effects such as interference and tunneling as well as chaotic scattering. He developed a strict quantum mechanical theory of chemical reaction rates, which generalizes the transition state theory of Wigner and Eyring and shows in a semiclassical approximation the existence of an instanton phenomenon that determines the reaction rates. Miller also developed the Reaction path Hamiltonian to describe the reactions of molecules with many atoms and a semiclassical extension of the simulation through classical molecular dynamics (CMD) for the detection of quantum effects (SC-IVR, semiclassical initial value representation). Miller and his group apply this method to the description of dynamic processes with molecules with many atoms in which no exact quantum mechanical calculations (such as for three to four atoms) are possible. In addition to chemical reactions, he also developed models for other dynamic processes in chemistry, for example photodissociation, Penning ionization and interaction with laser pulses. He also developed a general statistical theory of response rates.

He was a Sloan Fellow in 1970 and a Guggenheim Fellow in 1975/76. In 1981 he received the Humboldt Research Prize and in 1974 the Prize of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science (IAQMS), of which he has been a fellow since 1985. In 1990 he received the Irving Langmuir Award of the American Chemical Society (ACS), the Theoretical Chemistry Award of the ACS in 1994, the Ira Remsen Award of the ACS in 1997 and the Ernest Orlando Lawrence Prize in 1985 . In 1998 he received the Spiers Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, in 1996 the J. O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry, in 2003 the Peter Debye Award of the ACS and in 2007 the Herschbach Award in Molecular Dynamics.

Miller is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1987), the American Association for the Advancement of Science , the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993) and Fellow of the American Physical Society (1983). He has been a member of the Leopoldina since 2011 and was elected to the Royal Society as a foreign member in 2015. He has been married since 1966 and has two children.

literature

  • A Journey Through Chemical Dynamics , in: Annual Review of Physical Chemistry, Vol. 65: 1–19 (2014) (autobiographical article)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical data from American Men and Women of Science , Thomson Gale 2005
  2. ^ Biographical data, publications and academic family tree of William Hughes Miller at academictree.org, accessed January 3, 2019.
  3. ^ Laudation for the Welch Award ( Memento from September 30, 2011 in the Internet Archive )
  4. ↑ Member entry by Prof. Dr. William H. Miller (with picture and CV) at the Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina , accessed on July 19, 2016.
personal data
SURNAME Miller, William H.
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Miller, William Hughes (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American chemist
DATE OF BIRTH March 16, 1941
PLACE OF BIRTH Kosciusko , Mississippi