In 2018, the American Physical Society (APS) will celebrate the 125th anniversary of the first publication of its academic journal, Physics Review, and the 25th anniversary of its sister publication, Physics Review E (PRE). To achieve this, the PRE editorial board and journal editors went through 25 years of papers and selected 25 papers that have made important contributions to their respective fields as “milestones of the 25th anniversary of PRE.” These papers will be published on PRE’s website later this year.
Southern University of Science and Technology (SUSTech) was honored to find that Professor Shan Xioawen from the Department of Mechanics and Aerospace Engineering and his collaborator had their paper on the multiphase and multicomponent lattice Boltzmann model selected as one of these milestones. The original paper was published in 1993.
Originally founded by Professor Ernest F Nichols at Cornell University in 1893, Physics Review is the largest and most complete series of physics journals in the world. In 2017, the 13 peer-reviewed journals published more than 19,000 original and commentary articles. Many major physics discoveries in history were first published in a Physics Review journal.
In 1958, APS launched the Physical Review Letters (PRL) to meet the needs of rapidly releasing important research results. Subsequently, the increase in the number of papers led to the “Physical Review” divided into AD series according to the research field in 1970, and in 1993, the “Physical Review” E series was added, which specializes in statistical and non-linear physics, biophysics and soft matter physics.
Professor Shan Xiaowen’s contribution to the multiphase and multicomponent lattice Boltzmann model theory mainly focuses on two aspects. The first is the establishment of the classical Kinetic theory of the multiphase and multicomponent lattice Boltzmann model. The second is that in 1993, with postdoctoral researcher Chen Hudong, they introduced long-range interactions between particles at the micro-level.
It is this work that is the focus of the milestone paper for the 25th anniversary of PRE. The multiphase and multicomponent lattice Boltzmann model has a direct and rigorous foundation in statistical physics, which reflects the physical nature of the multi-phase multi-component flow. It also has the characteristics of the simple algorithm and data locality that makes it suitable for parallel computing. It has been widely used in a vast array of scientific and engineering areas, ranging from large dark energy simulations to determining shale gas flow through a porous medium.
Many researchers refer to this as the “Shan-Chen” model. After a quarter-century of historical testing, the paper now shows more than 2,300 citations on Google Scholar, showing a strong vitality. In 2009, Professor Shan Xiaowen was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for his pioneering contribution to the establishment and application of the multiphase and multicomponent lattice Boltzmann model.
