William H. Miller (chemistry)

William Hughes Miller ( born March 16, 1941 in Kosciusko, Attala County, Mississippi) is an American chemist, known for theoretical work on the quantum theory of chemical reactions.

Miller studied at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Bachelor 1963) and at Harvard University with a master's degree in 1964 and a doctorate in chemical physics in 1967. As a post-doctoral fellow, he was a NATO Fellow at the University of Freiburg and in 1968/69 Junior Fellow in Harvard. From 1969 to 1974 he was in the Chemistry Department at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory ( Principal Investigator ) and from 1974 professor at the University of California, Berkeley. 1989 to 1993 he was Director of the Department of Chemistry; he is there also Kenneth S. Pitzer Professor for Chemistry. Miller has been a visiting scientist at Cambridge (Churchill College 1975/76 ) and Oxford ( 1993 as Christensen Fellow ). He is an honorary professor of Shandong University in China.

In 2007 he received the Welch Award in Chemistry for fundamental work in the modern theory of dynamics of chemical reactions and reaction rates .. He developed a semiclassical theory of inelastic and reactive scattering processes of molecules (classical S- matrix theory ) and, based on an S- matrix version of the Kohn variational method for the calculation of reaction rates from quantum mechanics. He was with his theory describe typical quantum effects such as interference and tunneling and chaotic scattering. He developed a rigorous quantum- mechanical theory of chemical reaction rates, the Transition State Theory of Wigner and Eyring generalized and in semiclassical approximation, the existence of an instanton phenomenon indicates that determines the reaction rate. Miller also developed the Reaction path Hamiltonian for the description of reactions of molecules with many atoms and a semiclassical expansion of the simulation by classical molecular dynamics ( classical molecular dynamics, CMD) for the detection of quantum effects (SC- IVR, semiclassical initial value representation ). Miller and his group apply this method for the description of dynamic processes with molecules with many atoms, in which no exact quantum mechanical calculations (such as for three to four atoms ) are possible. In addition to chemical reactions, he also developed models for other dynamic processes in chemistry, for example, photodissociation, Penning ionization and interaction with laser pulses. He also developed a general statistical theory of reaction rates.

In 1970 he was Sloan Fellow and 1975/76 Guggenheim Fellow. In 1981 he received the Humboldt Research Award and the 1974 Award of the International Academy of Quantum Molecular Science ( IAQMS ) whose fellow he is since 1985. In 1990 he received the Irving Langmuir Award of the American Chemical Society (ACS ), 1994 Theoretical Chemistry Award of the ACS, 1997, Ira Remsen Award from the ACS and the 1985 Ernest Orlando Lawrence Award. In 1998 he received the Spiers Medal of the Royal Society of Chemistry, 1996 J. O. Hirschfelder Prize in Theoretical Chemistry, 2003 Peter Debye Award of the ACS and the 2007 Hersh Bach Award in Molecular Dynamics.

Miller is a member of the National Academy of Sciences (1987 ), the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993) and Fellow of the American Physical Society. Since 2011 he is a member of the Leopoldina. He has been married since 1966 and has two children.