John William Negele (born 18 April 1944 in

Cleveland, Ohio Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County, Ohio, Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–United States border, Canada–U.S. maritime border ...

) is an American theoretical nuclear physicist. Negele studied electrical engineering at

Purdue University Purdue University is a Public university#United States, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in West Lafayette, Indiana, United States, and the flagship campus of the Purdue University system. The university was founded ...

with a bachelor's degree in 1965. He received his PhD in theoretical physics from

Cornell University Cornell University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university based in Ithaca, New York, United States. The university was co-founded by American philanthropist Ezra Cornell and historian and educator Andrew Dickson W ...

in 1969, under the supervision of

Hans Bethe Hans Albrecht Eduard Bethe (; ; July 2, 1906 – March 6, 2005) was a German-American physicist who made major contributions to nuclear physics, astrophysics, quantum electrodynamics and solid-state physics, and received the Nobel Prize in Physi ...

, with the dissertation ''The Structure of Finite Nuclei in the Local Density Approximation''. He was a

postdoc A postdoctoral fellow, postdoctoral researcher, or simply postdoc, is a person professionally conducting research after the completion of their doctoral studies (typically a PhD). Postdocs most commonly, but not always, have a temporary academ ...

at the

Niels Bohr Institute The Niels Bohr Institute () is a research institute of the University of Copenhagen. The research of the institute spans astronomy, geophysics, nanotechnology, particle physics, quantum mechanics, and biophysics. Overview The institute was foun ...

of the University of Copenhagen. From 1970, he was at

MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of modern technology and sc ...

, first as a visiting assistant professor, and then from 1979 as a professor (becoming, in 1991, "W.A. Coolidge Professor"). He was the director of the Center for Theoretical Physics at MIT from 1989 to 1998 and is the director of the Atomic Science Institute at MIT (Laboratory of Nuclear Science, LNS). Negele's research deals with many-body theory in nuclear physics (including local density approximation, time-dependent Hartree-Fock (TDHF) methods, and path integral methods) and also with

many-body theory The many-body problem is a general name for a vast category of physical problems pertaining to the properties of microscopic systems made of many interacting particles. Terminology ''Microscopic'' here implies that quantum mechanics has to be ...

in spin systems. He originated the first

density functional theory Density functional theory (DFT) is a computational quantum mechanical modelling method used in physics, chemistry and materials science to investigate the electronic structure (or nuclear structure) (principally the ground state) of many-body ...

of finite nuclei starting from realistic (experimentally justified) nucleon-nucleon interactions. In doing so, he and his colleagues calculated the

binding energies In physics and chemistry, binding energy is the smallest amount of energy required to remove a particle from a system of particles or to disassemble a system of particles into individual parts. In the former meaning the term is predominantly used ...

of nuclei, single-particle excitation energies, charge distributions, and nuclear matter properties in

neutron stars A neutron star is the gravitationally collapsed core of a massive supergiant star. It results from the supernova explosion of a massive star—combined with gravitational collapse—that compresses the core past white dwarf star density to th ...

. Since the 1980s, he has dealt with

lattice QCD Lattice QCD is a well-established non- perturbative approach to solving the quantum chromodynamics (QCD) theory of quarks and gluons. It is a lattice gauge theory formulated on a grid or lattice of points in space and time. When the size of the ...

. He was also involved in the design of special computer clusters for such calculations. He was a

Guggenheim Fellow Guggenheim Fellowships are grants that have been awarded annually since by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, endowed by the late Simon and Olga Hirsh Guggenheim. These awards are bestowed upon individuals who have demonstrated d ...

for the academic year 1982–1983 and received the

Humboldt Research Award The Humboldt Research Award (), also known informally as the Humboldt Prize, is an award given by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany to internationally renowned scientists and scholars who work outside of Germany in recognition of t ...

. He was elected a Fellow of the

American Physical Society The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of ...

(APS) in 1978 and a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1987. In 2014, he received the Herman Feshbach Prize in Theoretical Nuclear Physics for "lifetime contributions to nuclear many-body theory including identifying mechanisms for saturation and relating the Skyrme interaction to fundamental nuclear forces; and for initiating and leading efforts to understand the nucleon using lattice QCD." He served as the first chair of the APS committee Computational Physics.

Selected publications

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References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Negele, John W. 20th-century American physicists 21st-century American physicists American nuclear physicists Purdue University College of Engineering alumni Cornell University alumni Fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellows of the American Physical Society 1944 births Living people MIT Center for Theoretical Physics faculty