John R Sabin

Biography

Dr. John Sabin is Professor of Physics and Chemistry at the University of Florida, and Adjungeret Professor at the Institute for Physics and Chemistry at the University of Southern Denmark.Degrees are from Williams College (AB) and the University of New Hampshire (PhD), and he was a postdoctoral student at Uppsala University and Northwestern University. He is Editor of Advances in Quantum Chemistry and the International Journal of Quantum Chemistry, and a member of several editorial boards. He publishes on various aspects of the theory of the interaction of fast ions with molecular targets.

Research Interest

Principal research interest is the study energy deposition, or stopping power, for swift ions in biomolecules. The attack is two pronged. In the first case, we use a fully quantum mechanical dynamics to study ion/(bio)molecule collisions and calculate collision, fragmentation, charge exchange, and other cross sections.  In a similar vein, we study the mean excitation energy of molecules and clusters, as the mean excitation energy is the quantity that best describes the ability of a molecule to absorb energy from a projectile ion.  The molecular mean excitation energies are obtained by direct calculation and integration of the appropriate generalized oscillator strengths (GOS\'s) using the polarization propagator formalism. In principle, the scheme provides an accurate method to calculate stopping for individual molecules, which can be extended to clusters by application of a Bragg-like combination rule.