Education and Training

• Ph. D. in Theoretical Physics Columbia University, New York May 1978
• M. Ph.D.,Theoretical Physics Columbia University, New York May 1976
• M. A., Physics Columbia University, New York May 1975
• B. A., Physics, Minor in Mathematics Columbia College, New York May 1972

Biography

Dr. Handy received all of his four degrees from Columbia University, concentrating in mathematics and physics, at the undergraduate level, and theoretical physics (i.e. path integral formulations of non-abelian gauge theories) at the graduate level, working under Dr. A. Mueller and Dr. John Klauder (AT&T). As a freshman he assisted Dr. Martin Gutzwiller (IBM) in his computational investigations of quantum chaos. He was the first participant and graduate of the AT&T Cooperative Research Fellowship Program which has produced many minority and women Ph.D’s in diverse academic disciplines. From 1978 – 81 he was a postdoctoral fellow at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Following a brief appointment in industry, Dr. Handy joined the faculty of (presently) Clark Atlanta University (1983 – 2005) where he co-founded the Center for Theoretical Studies of Physical Systems, one of the first successful HBCU-research and student mentoring centers in the nation. In 2005 he became the chair of the new physics program at Texas Southern University, in Houston, Texas. While at LANL, he focused on the development of singular perturbation, multi-scale, methods for strong coupling field theory problems. This led to a fascination with the Moment Problem (i.e. reconstruction of a positive signal through a hierarchy of, successively decreasing, scale related information) in pure mathematics and its incorporation into quantum physics. One branch of these investigations would eventually lead to the theory of Contiuous Wavelets as derived, through other means, by Grossman and Morlet. A second branch, funded through an NSF "Creativity Award" (1983 – 88), was the discovery that the moment problem leads to powerful new computational methods (within the spirit of control theory) for reliably predicting certain features of singular perturbation/strongly coupled systems. From 1985 – 1988 Dr. Handy pioneered these methods, together with D. Bessis. This approach, The "Eigenvalue Moment Method (EMM)", is now recognized as one of the first applications of Semidefinite Programming (SDP) in quantum physics, anticipating the importance of these methods by at least a decade. More recently, SDP has made a tremendous impact both in pure mathematics (i.e. combinatorics) and quantum chemistry through the N-Body problem reduction methods advocated by D. Mazziotti (U. Chicago), and others. Dr. Handy continues his research in this general area, with close to seventy publications, developing new ways of exploiting positivity constraints to computationally solve various quantum physics problems through the generation of rapidly converging lower and upper bounds to the physical parameters.

Research Interests

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Research/Scholarly Activities

The Vocano Function #1
The Vocano Function #2

Recent Publications (out of a total of xxx)

1. C. R. Handy, D. Khan, S. Okbagabir, and T. Yarahmad " Moment Problem Quantization within A Generalized Scalet-Wigner (Auto-Scaling) Transform Representation,” J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 36, 1623 (2003).

2. C. R. Handy and X. Q. Wang, "Spectral Bounds for the PT-breaking Hamiltonian $p^2 + x^4 + iax$, J. Phys. A.: Math. & Gen. 36, 11513 (2003).

3. C. R. Handy "Positivity Representations for non-Hermitian Hamiltonians," Czechoslovak J. of Physics 54, 57 (2004).

4. A. Rodriguez, C. R. Handy, and C. Trallero-Giner, Reply to Comment on "Excited States in the Infinite Quantum Lens Potential: Conformal Mapping and Moment Quantization Methods,” J. Phys.: Condenced Matter 16, 2945 (2004).

5. C. R. Handy "(Quasi)-convexification of Barta’s (multi-extrema) bounding theorem", J. Phys. A: Math. Gen. 39, 3425 (2006)