Inaugural lecture by Alexey E. Romanov on disclination in solids

On May 5th at 2:15 pm Alexey E. Romanov, UT Professor of Physics of Nanostructures, will hold his inaugural lecture at the University Assembly Hall. The lecture is entitled "DISCLINATION IN SOLIDS".

The lecture will provide an introduction to and overview of the recent achievements of the disclination approach in physics and mechanics of solids and in materials science. Disclinations are linear defects in solids. They manifest themselves as sources of characteristic singularities in the fields of displacement and rotation associated with defects. The lecture will focus on the properties of disclinations and the basic ideas concerning their application to the explanation of various phenomena observed in solids. First, necessary terms and definitions will be given and explained. Then the methods and results of calculation of elastic stresses and energies for screened disclinations will be presented. In the second part of the lecture, a series of models for the processes occurring in the structure of plastically deformed materials will be considered on the basis of the properties of screened disclinations. The bands with misorientated crystal lattice in metals and other materials will be described as resulting from disclination dipole motion. Disclination models will be applied to analyses of work-hardening at large strains, and to descriptions of the structure and properties of amorphous solids, nanostructured materials and nanoparticles. Finally, the global role of disclinations in ordered media will be briefly highlighted. In this connection, a series of examples of disclinations observed in such common and not very common notions/objects as mathematical vector fields, biological membranes, fingerprints, surface crystals (including graphene), type II superconductors, magnetic vortices, etc., will be given.

Professor Alexey E. Romanov graduated magna cum laude from the Physics and Mechanics Department of St. Petersburg State Polytechnical University (former Leningrad Polytechnical Institute) in Russia in 1978. He received a PhD in solid state physics from the same university in 1981, and started working in the research sector dealing with the theory of solids at Ioffe Physical-Technical Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences, St. Petersburg as a researcher. He was soon promoted to the position of senior researcher and then to that of lead researcher. In 1989 he defended his habilitation thesis at the Institute for Strength Physics and Materials Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Tomsk and received his Doctor of Physico-Mathematical Sciences degree in Solid State Physics. Professor Romanov developed a strong collaboration with scientists from leading research centres in Europe and the USA. In 1991 1992 he was a research fellow at the Max-Planck Institute für Metallforschung in Stuttgart, Germany and between 1995 and present spent more than two years as senior researcher / adjunct professor at the Materials Department of the University of California (Santa Barbara), USA. In February 2010 he was elected Professor of Physics of Nanostructures of the Institute of Physics of the University of Tartu. He is recipient of the 1991 Alexander von Humboldt (AvH) Fellowship Award, of the 2004 AvH Continuation Award, of the 2000 DFG Mercator Professorship Award, of the 2006 EU Erasmus Mundus Fellowship Award and the 2008 EU Marie Curie Senior Fellowship Award. During his career he has served as coordinator for a series of important research projects a number of which were funded by the Volkswagen Foundation and other major international and Russian funding agencies.
Professor Romanov is widely recognised for his work on the theory of disclinations in solids, for mesoscopic modeling of plastic deformation and fracture, for his studies of amorphous, nanostructured, and nanocomposite materials, and for his contribution to our understanding of the nanomechanics of defects in thin film electronic materials.

Alexey E. Romanov's professorship at the University of Tartu is supported by the European Social Fund through the DoRa Program Action 2. The aim of the doctoral studies and internationalization program DoRa 2 is to improve the quality of higher education by recruiting academic staff from abroad.

Ivar-Igor Saarniit
University of Tartu Academic Secretary

Additional information: Ms Kady Sõstar, public relations specialist, tel. +372 737 5685, e-mail: kady [dot] sostar [ät] ut [dot] ee