READING, PA -- Daniel B. Litvin, Distinguished Professor of Physics at Penn State Berks, has authored "Magnetic Group Tables: 1-, 2-, and 3-Dimensinal Magnetic Subperiodic Groups and Magnetic Space Groups," which has just been published as an electronic book by the International Union of Crystallography. Containing almost 12,000 pages of tables, the book surveys the structure, symbols and properties of the magnetic groups that define the symmetry of crystals.
In celebration of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) partnering with the International Union of Crystallography (IUCr) to declare 2014 as the International Year of Crystallography, Litvin's book is being made freely available to the scientific community and can be downloaded from the IUCr website at http://www.iucr.org/publ/978-0-9553602-2-0.
Litvin’s research interest is the symmetry-based prediction of the physical properties of crystals. He has authored more than 100 scholarly publications, including three books. He is a member of the Commission on Crystallographic Nomenclature, the Commission on International Tables and the Commission on Magnetic Structures, and is a consultant to the Commission on Mathematical and Theoretical Crystallography of the International Union of Crystallography. He has previously received the Amoco Foundation Outstanding Teaching Award and a Penn State Berks Outstanding Teaching Award.
Litvin earned his bachelor’s, master’s, and doctoral degrees in physics at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel, and holds a teaching certificate from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He received postdoctoral training as a research and teaching fellow at the University of British Columbia and the University of Tennessee. Litvin joined the Penn State faculty as an assistant professor in 1978 and was named Distinguished Professor of Physics in 2002.