Justin Holmer
Assistant Professor of Mathematics
Cool down atoms to a few billionths of a degree above absolute zero — minus 459 degrees Fahrenheit — and they begin to act in very un-atomlike ways. They lose their natural individuality and instead morph into a single blob. There is no measurement that can tell them apart.
Scientists call this state of matter the Bose-Einstein condensate, and they would like to know just where each atom is and what each atom is doing.
Justin Holmer, assistant professor of mathematics, hopes to explain this mystery through mathematics.
Granted, it’s a theoretical pursuit, Holmer acknowledged, but like other unknowns in science, the answer just might open up a whole trove of real-world applications.
“You might not at this point understand what you can do with a coherent blob of atoms,” Holmer explained, “but you may be able to do something.”
Holmer’s recent research has been on the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, one of the many types of nonlinear wave equations commonly studied in physics and math. Holmer looks at special types of solutions, called solitary waves, and tries to describe what happens to them when they are disturbed or how their behavior is affected when external forces are imposed.
“So this equation gives the wave function for a collection of atoms in a Bose-Einstein condensate,” he said.
Holmer, who will be 33 in September, grew up Lewiston, N.Y., on the U.S.-Canadian border. He said his interest in science came from his father, a chemist who worked on methods for gas purification, amassing 10 patents.
Holmer flirted with physics at the State University of New York–Stony Brook, but he ultimately turned to math.
“At each point,” he said, “I wanted a deeper analysis of what we were studying.”
He went on to the University of Chicago, earning his master’s and Ph.D. He came to Brown by way of the University of California–Berkeley, where he was an assistant professor in the mathematics department. He said the students were “very motivated.”
He expects no less from the students at Brown, where in addition to his research he will teach a course in partial differential equations.