Statement of Purpose

To discover something new is the only destination for a scientist. Nowadays in the race for revealing secrets of the nature physicists have reached extremely high and low energies. Further advancement is connected with the use of very expensive methods. Still many unexplained nonlinear phenomena are lying on ‘every-day world’ energy scales, mainly in the fields of condensed matter and biophysics. For example, such widespread phenomenon as turbulence is yet to be adequately explained.

My interest in nonlinear and complex physical systems arose rather early, when I was in high school. Behavior of the oscillations in Toda’s and other models of lattices struck me. The results obtained in my research dealing with simulations of nonlinear atomic lattices awakened my interest in such things as integrability and the theory of solitons. Later, when I was at the International Physics Olympiad in Oslo, Norway, an article I read in daily IPhO’s newspaper piqued my interest in quantum chaos. To satisfy my interest and to expand my knowledge of physics and mathematics I entered Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology (MIPT).

During the period of 1996-98, I took several special courses in nonlinear dynamics, chaos and self-organization. Several books about chaotic systems also fascinated me. My interest in quantum chaotic systems proceeded with reading a web-book “Classical and Quantum Chaos” by Predrag Cvitanovic’. Professor in the Theory of Self-organization A encouraged me further with a book by Hans Meinhardt on the formation of patterns on the seashells. I found the theory developed in this book elegant, but its solutions were proposed for a limited set of parameters only. Therefore, I modified the author’s program by introducing new parameters and obtained several new patterns.

In 1997 I began my studies and research at the Kapitza Institute for Physical Problems (IPP). I found my experience there very useful. The lectures on advanced statistical physics at the IPP improved my understanding of many important statistical concepts such as disorder, critical phenomena, phase transitions etc. Moreover, in the special course of Prof. B on data analysis I have studied in detail a new method of analysis – wavelet transform, that is widely used in investigations of chaotic systems.

Last year I became interested in the properties of condensed matter and began to work at the IPP as a research assistant under the guidance of Prof. C, investigating the models of muonium formation in condensed media. After extensive work with data analysis and computer simulations we managed to explain the results of the experiment on charges behavior in liquid helium carried out by Dr. D (Kurchatov Inst.) I studied properties of superfluid helium and methods of SR spectroscopy along with new approaches to computer simulations. On the basis of this research I made the report entitled "The study of muon-electron pairs motion in liquid helium under the influence of external electric field" at the 1998 MIPT Scientific Conference. By the end of the spring, our results will be published.

The investigations of nonlinear phenomena are very widespread at Physics Department of the University of California at Berkeley, especially in CMT, Nonlinear Dynamics and Plasma Physics groups. Therefore, I want to study physics at Berkeley in order to get a thorough education and research experience in theoretical and computational studies of nonlinear phenomena in different physical systems and particularly in condensed matter. I hope this experience will allow me to explore different chaotic and disordered systems and to find new regularities in their formation and behavior. In addition, I would like to investigate chaos in quantum analogs of classically chaotic systems in order to detect novel connections of quantum mechanics to the classical one. The possibility of getting a TA position also attracts me. The satisfaction and valuable scientific ideas I have derived from my tutoring experience have convinced me that I would enjoy simultaneous teaching and research.

I would regard my admission to the University of California at Berkeley not only as a great honor and success but also as an obligation for hard work.