Joel M. Bowman

Born, Boston, MA, January 16, 1948

Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor, Emory Univ.

Email: jmbowma@emory.edu
WWW: external link

Alexander von Humboldt Research Award 2019; Dudley Herschbach Award (Theory) 2013; Fellow, American Association for the Advancement of Science; Fellow, American Physical Society; Alfred P. Sloan Fellows; Roger Miller Lecturer; Robert Mullikan Lecturer University of Georgia, Visiting Fellow, Magdalen College, Oxford, Visiting Professor, Yale Univ, JILA Visiting Fellow

Author of:

Important Contributions:

• Joel Bowman has made significant contributions in the theory and computation of many aspects of chemical reaction dynamics and molecular vibrations. Notable among these were the development of ab initio potential energy surfaces (PESs) in high dimensionality using permutationally invariant fitting bases. Examples include the reactions X+CH₄ → HX + CH₃, X = H, O(³P), F, Cl and intersystem crossing in O+C₂H₄. Highly accurate potentials for H₅⁺, CH₅⁺, H₅O₂⁺, etc, have led to the most rigorous analyses of this complex cations. The approach has also resulted in the most accurate ab initio potential and dipole moment for water, built from 1, 2, 3-body high-level electronic energies and precisely fit. Reaction dynamics applications include the roaming pathway elucidated initially for H₂CO photodissociation and subsequently reported in numerous other systems. Efficient reduced dimensionality theories of quantum reactive scattering were developed, and among these J-shifting has been widely used. Bowman developed the vibrational self-consistent field and virtual state CI approaches to coupled molecular vibrations. Subsequently the efficient and accurate n-mode representation of the potential was developed and incorporated into the code MULTIMODE, and also an implementation in MOLPRO by Rauhut. This code has been used in many applications ranging from the rovibrational spectroscopy of polyatomic molecules to the vibrational dynamics of molecular clusters, including water clusters and hydrated ions.