Brian Wells

Education

PhD, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

MS, University of Massachusetts, Lowell

BS, Clark University

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Research Interests:

Currently I am interested and in two major areas of research. (1) Computational and theoretical photonics in composites, metamaterials, and multi-scale systems and (2) the investigation of low dimensional magnetic materials, magnetic frustration, and randomized magnetic systems.

The first area of research includes computational and theoretical photonics and plasmonics in composites, metamaterials, and multi-scale systems using linear algebra solvers such as MATLAB and Finite Element Method (FEM) software. This consists of developing theories and performing numerical simulations of optical metamaterials for strongly anisotropic composites that primarily include plasmonic nanowire assemblies. This is being done in collaboration with the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

In addition to strictly computational and theoretical research I have begun establishing a lab to develop and design affordable microwave metamaterials that can be used to investigate cloaking, negatively indexed materials, super-lensing, and lattice distortion effects. By scaling up the wavelength to the microwave region, it has made this research very practical for an undergraduate institution. At longer wavelengths the materials can be fabricated using traditional silk printing techniques with conductive ink on choice substrates. Numerical and theoretical modeling can be applied and tested using experimental results for these new configurations.

For the second major area, we have been looking at the spin-spin interactions for low dimensional frustrated and randomized magnetic systems. Using the ALPS project (Algorithms and Libraries for Physics Simulations) open source simulation codes for strongly correlated quantum mechanical systems and MATLAB to compute susceptibilities, magnetization, and energy levels for a variety of magnetic configurations which are then compared to quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) and experimental results. A primary topic of focus has been magnetic frustration for isolated tetrahedral systems. These results are compared and fit to QMC and experimental data provided by the magneto-Chemistry group at Clark University.