Harry Swinney

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Harry L Swinney (born 1940) is an American physicist noted for his contributions to the field of nonlinear dynamics. He is currently the director of the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics at the University of Texas at Austin.

Swinney graduated from Rhodes College in 1961 with a Bachelor degree and obtained his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins University in 1968. He came to the University of Texas at Austin in 1978 and eventually headed the Center for Nonlinear Dynamics.

Swinney was among one of the pioneers in chaos theory, most notably for the experiments he did with Jerry Gollub on the onset of turbulence for water in rotating cylinders ("Couette-Taylor" flow). His general research interest have concerned instabilities, chaos, pattern formation, and turbulence in systems driven away from equilibrium by the imposition of gradients in temperature, velocity, concentration, etc.

His past research concerned:

chaos and pattern formation in flow between concentric rotating cylinders (the "Couette-Taylor" system)
chaos and strange attractors in oscillating chemical reactions
a laboratory model of Jupiter's Great Red Spot
a laboratory model of the atmospheric "blocking" phenomenon
turbulence in buoyancy driven convection; pattern formation in surface-tension-driven (" Marangoni") convection
growth of metallic fractal clusters in electrodeposition
chemical patterns of the type predicted by Alan Turing in his 1952 paper "The Chemical Basis for Morphogenesis"
other patterns in chemical reaction-diffusion systems, including reactions that are periodically forced in time, where "Arnold tongue" type phase diagrams have been found
vertically oscillated containers of grains (sand, metallic particles, etc.), which exhibit square, stripe, hexagon, spiral, and oscillon (localized) patterns.

His current research topics include:

shock waves in supersonic sand
the determination of statistical properties of rapid granular flows, where the observations are compared to the predictions of kinetic theory and continuum theory
instabilities in fluidized beds, where a fluid flows upward through a granular bed, such as in a gasoline refinery catalytic cracker
formation of "viscous finger" patterns at the interface between immiscible fluids
buckling of thin sheets (plastic, leaves of plants)
scaling and transport in rapidly rotating turbulent flows, such as those in oceans and atmospheres.