Michael G. Fuda

Professor of Physics and Undergraduate Director

Office: 333 Fronczak Hall
Phone: (716) 645-2017 x 192
Fax: (716) 645-2507
Email: fuda@buffalo.edu

Brief C.V.

MICHAEL FUDA received his B.S. degree in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1960 and his Ph.D. in Physics from the same institution in 1967. He did two years of graduate work at the University of Rochester from 1960 to 1962, and was a Research Physicist at the Knolls Atomic Power Lab from 1962 to 1964. He joined the University at Buffalo as an Assistant Professor in 1967. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1972, and to Full Professor in 1978. During the 1973 to 1974 academic year he was a Visiting Professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Professor Fuda is the recipient of the State University of New York Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Teaching and is a Fellow of the American Physical Society.

His original research interest was in the nonrelativistic quantum mechanics of few particle systems, but for the many years now his research has focused on the relativistic quantum mechanics of such systems.

Research Activities

Professor Fuda's research is now focused on the relativistic quantum mechanics of few particle systems. Here the goal is to formulate and solve quantum mechanical models for such systems, which exactly satisfy the requirements of special relativity. Essentially the basic requirements are that the probabilities of events are the same in all inertial frames; and that certain properties of systems, such as their rest mass and intrinsic spin, are invariant under inhomogeneous Lorentz transformations.

The basic problem is to construct operators that provide a unitary representation of the inhomogeneous Lorentz group, also called the Poincaré group. These operators are used to transform quantum mechanical state vectors from one inertial frame to another. For the subgroup of continuous transformations the unitary operators can be constructed in terms of ten generators, which can be taken to be the components of the four-momentum operator, the three components of the angular momentum operator, and the three components of the so-called boost operator. The generators in turn can be expressed in terms of an invariant mass operator for the system and other operators such as an intrinsic spin operator. The mass operator and these other operators satisfy much simpler commutation rules than the generators themselves. This makes it relatively straightforward to construct models for two-particle systems, as well as coupled two-particle systems, which satisfy exactly the requirements of special relativity. For systems with three or more particles it is also necessary to take into account the requirement of cluster separability, sometimes also called the principle of macroscopic locality. This is the requirement that when the system is separated into subsystems the mathematical description should reduce to the description of the subsystems. This is especially important in scattering problems where initially and finally the system is separated into two or more fragments.

The requirements of special relativity, i.e. Poincaré invariance, place restrictions on the possible interactions between particles, however there is still a lot of freedom left in choosing interactions. Most people believe that quantum field theory provides the basis for constructing interactions. More explicitly, it is generally believed that interactions are due to the exchange of particles. The most important part of the electromagnetic interaction between two charged particle is due to the exchange of a photon, while the longest range part of the strong interaction between two nucleons is due to the exchange of a pion. Recently Professor Fuda has been developing systematic techniques for using particle exchange models as the basis for constructing Poincaré invariant, quantum mechanical models of few particle systems. In particular a relativistic one boson exchange model of the two-nucleon system has been constructed which allows for the exchange of pi, eta, rho, omega, delta, and sigma mesons.

Even more ecently two models for the pion-nucleon system have been developed which take into account coupling to the inelastic channels. One is a purely phenomenological model which assumes so-called separable interactions, while the other is a more realistic exchange model. The separable model gives a good description of the pion-nucleon scattering data up to pion laboratory kinetic energies of 1.0 GeV; the exchange model fits the data up to 700 MeV. Both models are now being used to calculate the photo- and electroproduction of mesons from the nucleon. It is anticipated that these calculations will provide useful information on the electromagnetic excitation of the baryon resonances. They may also help in the search for the so-called "missing resonances". These are resonances that are predicted by the quark model, but don't show up in pion-nucleon elastic scattering.

Some Recent Publications

  1. A New Picture for Light Front Dynamics-II, M.G. Fuda, Ann. Phys. (NY) 231, 1 (1994).

  2. Light Front Dynamics and the Bonn One Boson Exchange Nucleon-Nucleon Potentials, M.G. Fuda and Yingfang Zhang in Proceedings of the XIVth International Conference on Few-Body Problems in Physics, edited by Franz Gross, AIP Conf. Proc. No. 334 (AIP, New York, 1995).

  3. Light Front Dynamics of One Boson Exchange Models of the Two-Nucleon System, Michael G. Fuda and Yingfang Zhang, Phys. Rev. C 51, 23 (1995).

  4. Instant Form Dynamics of One Particle Exchange Models, Michael G. Fuda, Phys. Rev. C 52, 1260 (1995).

  5. Poincaré Invariant Coupled Channel Model for the Pion-Nucleon System, Michael G. Fuda, Phys. Rev. C 52, 2875 (1995).
    Link for PRC52,2875(1995).pdf

  6. Comparison of Instant and Front Form One-Particle Exchange Models, Michael G. Fuda and Yingfang Zhang, Phys. Rev. C 54, 495 (1996).

  7. Poincaré Invariant Coupled Channel Model for the Pion-Nucleon System. II. An Extended Model, Yasser Elmessiri and Michael G. Fuda, Phys. Rev. C 57, 2149 (1998).
    Link for PRC57,2149(98).pdf

  8. Poincaré Invariant Coupled-Channel Models for Meson Photoproduction, Michael G. Fuda, Few-Body Systems 23, 127 (1998).
    Link for FBS23,127(98).pdf

  9. Poincaré Invariant Exchange Model of Pion-Nucleon Scattering, Yasser Elmessiri and Michael G. Fuda, Phys. Rev. C 60, 044001 (1999).
    Link for PRC60,044001(99).pdf

  10. Relativistic quantum mechanics and the S matrix, M.G. Fuda, Phys. Rev. C 64, 027001(2001).
    Link for PRC64,027001(2001).pdf

  11. A method for calculating meson photoproduction from the nucleon, M.G. Fuda and H. Alharbi, PiN Newsletter 16, 337 (2002).
    Link for Ref11.pdf

  12. Meson Photoproduction from the Nucleon, M.G. Fuda and H. Alharbi, Nucl. Phys. A (to appear).
    Link for Ref12.pdf

  13. Photoproduction of mesons from the nucleon, M.G. Fuda and H. Alharbi, Phys. Rev. C, 68, 064002 (2003).
    Link for Ref13.pdf

  14. A method for constructing relativistic three-particle models for the pion - nucleon system, M.G. Fuda, Phys. Rev. C 72, 064001 (2005).
    Link for Ref14.pdf

Student Thesis

Hamoud H. Alharbi, Ph.D. 2002

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