Douglas Leon MillsProfessor

In his research Doug made seminal contributions to several areas of condensed matter physics, namely to phonon physics, inelastic light scattering, low energy electron diffraction, infrared absorption, surface excitations, electronic transport properties, and magnetic properties of solids. The majority of this work was done in the context of surface physics. He was an early contributor to the modern theory of surface electromagnetic waves that began in the late 1960s, which laid the theoretical foundations of the contemporary field of plasmonics.
Particularly significant was his series of papers devoted to surface waves on magnetic media of several types: ferromagnets, antiferromagnets, and magnetoelastic media. A major interest of his was the scattering of light and of low energy electrons from crystal surfaces as a means of studying surface excitations. He produced the first theories of the Raman scattering of light from surface phonon polaritons on semiconductors, from metal surfaces, and from surface spin waves on opaque ferromagnets, as well as of infrared absorption by binary metallic alloys and by multiphonon processes in alkali-halide crystals.