Adjunct Professor of Physics
On Faculty since 2011
Office: Science Building 364
Phone: (630)752-5896
Fax: (630)752-5996
Email: joshua.whitney@wheaton.edu
Education
Ph. D., Physics, University of Tennessee, 2011
B.S., Physics and Computer Science, King College, 2004
About Joshua Whitney
Dr. Whitney does research in theoretical baryon spectroscopy, particularly constraint dynamics as it applies to the quark model.
He and his wife met as physics undergraduates at their alma mater and married in 2005. They are local food enthusiasts and enjoy supporting farmers markets and locally-owned restaurants, as well as cooking at home. Dr. Whitney is also a fitness enthusiast.
Courses Taught
Membership in Professional Societies
- American Physical Society
Research
Dr. Whitney has done work on the 3-body problem for theoretical baryon spectroscopy. The baryon is a hadron containing three quarks in some combination of up, down, strange, charm, and bottom. In determining the baryon energy spectrum, the baryon is treated as a three-body system with the interacting forces coming from a set of two-body potentials that depend on both the distance between the quarks and the spin and orbital angular momentum coupling terms. In particular, the Two-Body Dirac equations of constraint dynamics are such that they naturally account for spin through a Klein-Gordon-like equation obtained by squaring the Dirac equations.
Publications
(in preparation) Whitney J.F., and Crater H.W. Constraint Dynamics for Baryon spectroscopy
Conference Presentations and posters
Whitney J.F., and Crater H.W. Dirac's Covariant Constraint Dynamics Applied to the Baryon Spectrum. American Physical Society April Meeting (February 2010, poster)