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\name{Bernd A. Berg}

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Box 351560
Department of Physics
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-1560
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To Whom It May Concern:

With this letter I would like to recommend Alexei Bazavov 
strongly for an Assistant Professorship in your department.

Alexei was a student at the Bogoliubov Institute for Theoretical 
Physics in Kiev before he joined FSU in the spring 2003 semester.
Immediately upon his arrival he passed the Ph.D.\ qualifying exam 
of the Physics Department with the highest score in this year. He
started then to work with me as his thesis adviser on lattice gauge
theory (LGT) Monte Carlo (MC) calculations and completed his Ph.D.\ 
in 2007. Resulting from this time, we published 18 papers together (9 
in refereed journals and 9 in refereed proceedings).  He already has 
21 conference presentations and two of these talks at highly 
visible conferences (Lattice 2004 and APS DPF) are about our joint work.

Alexei arrived at FSU highly knowledgeable about the Linux operating 
system and with outstanding programming skills in C/C++ and Fortran. 
He insisted on programming his simulation code from scratch and along 
the way we combined Metropolis and heatbath concepts in a way that 
simplifies and/or improves the updating for a number of models [PRD 71, 
114506; PRD 72, 117501 (with Heller)]. This algorithm sidetracked us 
into a study of U(1) LGT in the finite temperature geometry [PRD 74, 
094502], which laid the groundwork for some recent joint work with 
Yannick Meurice's group [PRD 85, 056010].

From the physics side, we were interested in a better understanding of
QCD at high temperature, which on the experimental side is pursued by
heavy ion experiments and BNL and CERN. Picking up where my previous 
graduate student Alexander Velytsky left, we first focused on dynamical 
aspects of the QCD deconfining phase transition.  
We investigated Glauber dynamics of Polyakov loop 
structure factors [PRD 74, 014501 (with Velytsky)] and went on to 
study this for Pisarski's SU(3) Polyakov loop model in Minkowski space 
[PRD 78, 034024 (with Dumitru)]. In course of these investigations we 
started to focus on calculating for the thermodynamics of a quark-gluon 
plasma  in a RHIC geometry those finite size corrections, which are due 
to the fact that the deconfined volumes are small and bordered by the 
confined exterior. While our original paper [PRD 76, 014502] remained
limited to a simple boundary condition (BC) for pure SU(3) LGT, the 
results are essentially confirmed by recent work with more sophisticated 
BCs by Wu and myself. For deconfined volumes of a size that can be 
created in heavy-ion experiments cold BCs lead to an increase of their
effective transition temperature. Assuming that a similar increase is
still required when quarks are included, previous lattice calculations 
aiming at the infinite volume limit underestimate the transition 
temperature in RHIC. Therefore, the goal is to move forward to full 
QCD simulations and with his present involvement in the MILC and hotQCD 
collaborations Alexei is well positioned to take the lead.

Alexei comes from a family of physicists and is therefore very much 
at ease with the field. He has a very pleasant personality and it
is highly enjoyable to work with him. As a teaching assistant,  Alexei was an excellent 
teacher for our undergraduate students. Later on he was instrumental 
in getting our graduate students into regular meetings where they discussed 
physics with one another. Putting everything together, I think Alexei
was my best graduate student and in a sense also postdoc during my
25 years as professor at FSU. One of my previous students and two of
my previous postdocs are now tenured professors (Villanova at Universitat
Pompeu Fabra (Spain), Hansmann at Michigan Technological University,
and Janke at Leipzig University). Also I would see Alexei in the same 
class as Peter Petreczky, who was recently appointed a staff scientist at BNL.

After graduating from FSU, Alexei joined the MILC and later the hotQCD 
collaborations. He is now at BNL on his second postdoc and I assume that 
senior members of the collaborations will give you an
accurate account of his contributions, which I only follow from 
a distance. The number of his publications increased to 52 of which 
the paper {\it Equation of state and QCD transitions at 
finite temperature} [PRD 80, 014504] is definitely seminal work 
about the equation of state and chiral properties in 2+1 flavor 
QCD. Using improved staggered fermion actions, to which Alexei made 
major contributions, they are able to 
perform calculations with physical strange quark mass and almost 
physical light quark masses.

In summary, Alexei is a very talented physicists, who masters quantum 
field theory on a profound level and has turned out to be extraordinary 
versatile in applying advanced numerical methods to very interesting and 
challenging physics problems and obtain results that experimentalists 
need to interpret data. With his 
talents and enthusiasm he is ready for a tenure-track position 
at a research university or a prestigious position like the Oppenheimer 
Fellowship at LANL.
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Sincerely yours,\par
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Bernd Berg 

(Dirac Professor of Physics)
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