Dr. Robert Fisher
Robert Fisher, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
- Ph.D. in Physics, University of California at Berkeley, 2002
- B.S. in Physics with Honors, California Institute of Technology, 1994
Contact Information:
- E-Mail: rfisher1@umassd.edu
- Phone: 508.999.8353
- Office: Violette 220-2
Biography:
Dr. Robert Fisher is a new faculty member in the physics department at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. He earned his B.S. in physics with honors from Caltech in 1994, where he was the recipient of the George W. Green Memorial Prize in creative scholarship. He received his Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 2002, where he received a NASA Graduate Research Fellowship. He was subsequently a postdoctoral research scholar at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL, 2002-2005), and research scientist at the DOE ASC Flash Center in the Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Chicago (2005-2008). While at Chicago, he was also an adjunct faculty member at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he taught a popular course on introductory astronomy for undergraduate art majors.
The primary theme of Dr. Fisher's research is the fundamental physics of turbulent flows, and its application to the two endpoints of stellar evolution -- star formation and supernovae -- using a combination of theoretical and computational techniques. While at LLNL, he developed the first quantitative theory of the distribution of stellar binary periods. At Chicago, Dr. Fisher led an international team of computational scientists and physicists in the development and analysis of the largest three-dimensional computer simulation of weakly-compressible fully-developed turbulence ever completed, resulting in the publication of two Physical Review Letters, and a third paper to the Journal of Fluid Mechanics. Also at Chicago, Dr. Fisher was part of the team to carry out the first self-consistent computational simulation of the three-dimension detonation of a Type Ia supernova. This research on turbulence and Type Ia supernovae was honored earlier this year by the DOE with a Certificate of Service.
Dr. Fisher is starting a new research group in computational astrophysics in the physics department, and is actively pursuing several exciting research projects in star formation and supernovae. He invites graduate and undergraduate students who are interested in theoretical astrophysics and computational physics to drop by to speak with him.
Areas Of Interest:
- Fundamental Physics of Turbulent Flows
- Scientific Computing
- Star Formation and the Physics of the Interstellar Medium
- Type Ia Supernovae
Selected Publications:
Selected Recent Publications
- PS Li, C. McKee, R. Klein, R. Fisher, Sub-Alfvenic Non-Ideal MHD Turbulence Simulations with Ambipolar Diffusion: I. Turbulence Statistics, The Astrophysical Journal, 684:380-394, 2008. (astro-ph)
- A. Arneodo, R. Benzi, J. Berg, L. Biferale, E. Bodenschatz, A. Busse, E. Calzavarini, B. Castaing, M. Cencini, L. Chevillard, R. Fisher, R. Grauer, H. Homann, D. Lamb, A.S. Lanotte, E. Leveque, B. Luethi, J. Mann, N. Mordant, W.-C. Mueller, S. Ott, N.T. Ouellette, J.-F. Pinton, S. B. Pope, S.G. Roux, F. Toschi, H. Xu, P.K. Yeung, Universal Intermittent Properties of Particles in Highly-Turbulent Flows, Physical Review Letters, Phys. Rev. Lett. 100, 254504, 2008. (ADS)
- G. C. Jordan IV, R. T. Fisher, D. M. Townsley, A. C. Calder, C. Graziani, S. Asida, D. Q. Lamb, and J. W. Truran, Three-Dimensional Simulations of the Deflagration Phase of the Gravitationally-Confined Detonation Model of Type Ia Supernovae, The Astrophysical Journal, 681:1448–1457, 2008. (ADS) (doi)
- R. Benzi, L. Biferale, R. T. Fisher, L. P. Kadanoff, D. Q. Lamb, and F. Toschi, Intermittency and Universality in Fully-Developed Inviscid and Weakly-Compressible Turbulent Flows, Physical Review Letters, 100, 234503-07, 2008. (ADS)
(doi) - R. Crockett, P. Colella, R. T. Fisher, R. I. Klein, C. F. McKee, An Unsplit, Cell-Centered Godunov Method for Ideal MHD, Journal of Computational Physics, 203, 422-448, 2005. (ADS) (doi)
- R. T. Fisher, A Turbulent Interestellar Medium Origin of the Binary Period Distribution, The Astrophysical Journal, 600:769–780, 2004. (ADS) (doi)
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