A. Brooks Harris

Arthur Brooks Harris, called Brooks Harris, (March 25, 1935) is an American physicist.

Biography Harris was born in Boston, Massachusetts, and studied at Harvard University with bachelor's degree in 1956, master's degree in 1959, and PhD in experimental solid state physics from Horst Meyer in 1962. Harris was in 1961/62 at Duke University to complete his doctoral thesis with Meyer and then was an instructor there from 1962 to 1964. During 1961–1964 at Duke University Harris retrained himself as a theorist in condensed matter physics and then spent the academic year 1964/65 as a researcher working with John Hubbard in the UK at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment (Harwell Laboratory) near Harwell, Oxfordshire.

In 1973 he developed at Oxford the Harris criterion, which indicates the extent to which the critical exponents of a phase transition are modified by a small amount of randomness (e.g., defects, dislocations, or impurities). Such impurities "smear" the phase transition and lead to local variations in the transition temperature. Let denote the spatial dimension of the system and let denote the critical exponent of correlation length. The Harris criterion states that if

the impurities do not affect the critical behavior (so that the critical behavior is then stable against the random interference). For example, in the classical three-dimensional Heisenberg model and thus the Harris criterion is satisfied, while the three-dimensional Ising model has and thus does not satisfy the criterion .

Selected publications "Effect of Random Defects on the Critical Behaviour of Ising Models,” A. Brooks Harris, J. Phys. C 7, 1671–1692 (1974). “Single-Particle Excitations in Narrow Energy Bands,” A. Brooks Harris and Robert V. Lange, Phys. Rev. 157, 295–314 (1967). “Renormalization-Group Approach to the Critical Behavior of Random-Spin Models,” A. Brooks Harris and T. C. Lubensky, Phys. Rev. Lett. 33, 1540–1543 (1974). “Comment on “Orientational Ordering Transition in Solid C60”," Ravi Sachidanandam and A. B. Harris, Phys. Rev. Lett. 67, 1467–1467 (1991). “Possible Néel Orderings of the Kagomé Antiferromagnet,” A. B. Harris, C. Kallin, and A. J. Berlinsky, Phys. Rev. B 45, 2899–2919 (1992). “Mean Field Theory of the Orientational Properties of (J = 1) Molecules on the Surface of Grafoil,” A. B. Harris and A. J. Berlinsky, Can. J. Phys. 7, 1852–1868 (1979). “Molecular Chirality and Chiral Parameters,” A. B. Harris, R. D. Kamien, and T. C. Lubensky, Rev. Mod. Phys. 71, 1745–1757 (1999). “Magnetically Driven Ferroelectric Order in Ni3V2O8,” G. Lawes, A. B. Harris, T. Kimura, N. Rogado, R. J. Cava, A. Aharony, O. Entin-Wohlman, T. Yildirim, M. Kenzelmann, C. Broholm, and A. P. Ramirez, Phys. Rev. Lett. 95, 087205 (2005). “Anisotropic Spin Hamiltonians due to Spin-Orbit and Coulomb Exchange Interactions,” T. Yildirim, A. B. Harris, Amnon Aharony, and O. Entin-Wohlman, Phys. Rev. B 52, 10239–10267 (1995). “Observation of the Pair Interaction Between Ortho Molecules in Solid H2,” A. Brooks Harris, Larry I. Amstutz, Horst Meyer, and Samuel M. Myers, Phys. Rev. 175, 603–609 (1968).