March 16, 2011

by Benjamin White

Physics and math have always fascinated Dr. Tatiana Savin, and her position as newest member and sole mathematician at NQPI will allow her to work at their intersection.

Savin came to Ohio University five years ago and, after learning about a possibility of collaboration with scientists studying material science, joined NQPI in May. Analysis is her specialty within the realm of mathematics, which complements material science nicely.

“When I learned NQPI exists, of course I wanted to join them,” Savin said.

Savin knew she wanted to study math and physics in high school when she interned at the Metal Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Science in the Department of Theoretical Physics. In college, she held a summer job at Russian Academy of Science’s Institute of Solid State Physics studying amorphous alloys.

Savin worked on her master's thesis participating in biomedical research involving Nitinol, an alloy with shape memory, by making stents for use in angioplasty to correct arterial stenosis. Previously the standard procedure for angioplasty was to insert a compressed, spiral shaped stent into a narrowed portion of the artery and release it. The expanding spiral widens the artery to increase its blood flow. The use of the stent made out of the shape memory alloy makes the procedure significantly more efficient, since the spiral then can be straightened into a small piece of a wire at the room temperature which makes it easy to insert into an artery. Savin’s contributed to this project by determining the precise composition as well as the heat and deformation treatment of the stent to ensure the desired phase transition occurs at the human body temperature.

After receiving her master's degree, Savin worked on the design of bimetallic rods for a transport nuclear reactor regulating system. She also served in a national program to prevent nuclear disasters like Chernobyl by conducting numerical simulations of failures in the nuclear power reactors following an accidental loss of the coolant.

“I always enjoyed more doing a theoretical part of any research rather than experimental. That is why I received Ph.D. in mathematics from Moscow University,” Savin said.

Before she arrived in Athens, Savin worked at Technion (Israel) and Northwestern University as a mathematician in a team of physicists and engineers in the field of nanotechnology. She worked in the areas of crystal growth, thin films, quantum dots and nanowires.

Savin’s mathematical research interests are in the fields of complex analysis and differential equations. Her current interest to free boundary problems can help real life problems related to materials science and fluid dynamics. Her works in progress involve the Hele-Shaw problem and theoretical justification of vapor-liquid-solid model (VLS) for growth of nanowires. VLS growth, where a layer of liquid in which a soluble crystal material is situated between the vapor and growing crystal, was discovered by Wagner and Ellis half a century ago. The whiskers grown then had diameters on the micron scale, but smaller wires with a diameter of about 50 nanometers were grown recently. Savin hopes to one day create a shape of the liquid/solid interface in a VLS model.