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Department of Physics |
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Mark P. Taylor office: Gerstacker 118 phone: (330) 569-5241 email: taylormp@hiram.edu
I am on sabbatical for the '08-09 academic year. I am currently in Mainz, Germany at the Johannes-Gutenberg-Universitat working in the Institut fur Physik with the research group of Prof. Kurt Binder. I can still be reached at my Hiram email address.
Current Courses:
Other Courses I Regularly Teach:
Education: Ph.D. Physics, 1991 Brandeis University Thesis: "Statistical Mechanical Models of Liquid Crystalline Ordering" B.S. Physics, 1982 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Academic Appointments: 5/05-present Hiram College, Associate Prof. of Physics 9/01-5/05 Hiram College, Assistant Prof. of Physics 9/99-8/01 Swarthmore College, Visiting Assistant Prof. of Physics 7/98-8/99 Dartmouth College, Visiting Assistant Prof. of Chemistry 5/91-4/98 Dartmouth College, Postdoc and Visiting Scholar, Chemistry
Research Interests: Theoretical problems in statistical mechanics, especially in the area of fluids. Use of analytic theory, numerical analysis, and computer simulation to study structural and thermodynamic properties of liquid crystals, polymers, biological macromolecules, and other complex fluid systems. Much of my recent research has been concerned with polymer chain conformation and collapse. I am especially interested in the coupling between chain conformation and local solvent structure and have been developing an approach to map the "many-body" chain-in-solvent problem to the simpler "few-body" single chain problem. This mapping is illustrated in the following Monte Carlo snapshot that shows a 50-bead hard-sphere chain (blue) in a hard-sphere solvent (red) at volume fraction 0.40 which we are able to represent as a single chain (green) interacting via a set of effective potentials. See the publications below with my students Sayuri Ichida and Greg Petersen for more details.
Selected Publications (or full
list):
M.P. Taylor and S. Ichida*, Conformation of a Polymer Chain in Explicit Solvent: A Solvation Potential Approach, J. Polym. Sci. B: Polym. Phys. 45, 3319-3326 (2007). [pdf] M.P. Taylor, Collapse Transition of Isolated Square-Well Chain Molecules: The Exact Density of States for Short Chains, J. Chem. Phys. 118, 883-891 (2003). [pdf]
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