Emeritus Professor Bob Dewar

BSc (Melb), MSc(Melb), PhD (Princeton)
Emeritus Professor, Mathematical Sciences Institute

Robert Dewar BSc (Melb), MSc(Melb), PhD (Princeton) is an Elected Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science and an Elected Fellow of the American Physical Society. He was Convenor of the former ARC Complex Open Systems Research Network (COSNet).  

Bob works in the general area of theoretical plasma physics. This field provides a rich array of problems in classical field theory, fluid dynamics, nonlinear dynamics and chaos, and nonequilibrium statistical mechanics.  He works mainly in problems related to laboratory plasmas, in particular to the toroidal magnetic confinement approach to the development of fusion power, but has also an interest in space and astrophysical plasmas.

 

Research interests

  • Multi-region relaxation model of self-organization in magnetized three-dimensional plasmas.
  • Breakup of invariant (KAM) tori in Hamiltonian systems and its effect on transport -- a problem in classical chaos theory.
  • Linear spectrum of waves and instabilities in stellarators -- a classical application of "quantum chaos" theory.

Groups