JAMES A. McNEIL

	James Mcneil Professor and Department Head Meyer Hall Rm. 325 Phone: 303-273-3844 email: jamcneil@mines.edu	Personal Home Page
Professor and Department Head. BS Lafayette College; MS, PhD University of Maryland.

Biography and Research Interests

Following a brief sojourn in the Army, in 1974 I started graduate school at the University of Maryland and gravitated toward theoretical physics, eventually landing a research assistantship in the nuclear theory group. My wife, Lynda, and I started a family while we both were still in graduate school, and while it wasn't easy balancing the demands of research with raising a family, we managed and now look back on those times as among our happiest.

I wrote my Ph.D. thesis on proton-deuteron scattering and graduated in 1979. I accepted a postdoctoral position at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. I ended up spending seven years in the Philadelphia area doing research and teaching at Villanova University (1983-84) and Drexel University (1984-85) before joining the Colorado School of Mines in 1986.

My research interests since coming to Mines have evolved toward the more fundamental aspects of nuclear theory. Much of my early work dealt with the role of relativity in nuclear scattering and structure. In particular, together with colleagues from CU, Boulder, I used a relativistic field theory of nucleons and mesons to describe nuclear structure and scattering from the same fundamental starting point. We eventually hit upon the theoretical limits imposed by the fact that nucleons are not actually point particles describable by a fundamental field. We then investigated a class of models of subnucleonic structure motivated by quantum chromodynamics.

The uncontrollable aspects of the approximations needed to solve even the simple models, however, were not very satisfying. Moreover, the basic theoretical issues did not deal with the specific phenomenology as much as with relativistic quantum field theory itself.

Starting around 1992, my research focus shifted toward understanding relativistic quantum field theories better. This investigation was carried out with scalar field theories where the important issues of nonperturbative phenomena and renormalization are present without the complications of spin.

Our studies included both Monte Carlo calculations of scalar field theories on a lattice as well as applications of Wilson's renormalization group concepts to the resulting "data." This play of theory and numerical experiment has enabled us to make significant progress in understanding scalar quantum field theories.

In 2000 I became Head of the Physics Department which has limited my research time, but I am still pursuing a better description of nuclear scattering phenomena particularly reactions important to nuclear astrophysics. At the same time I have branched into physics education research with a focus on the use of design and fabrication activities to provide students a better understanding of electromagnetic phenomena in the introductory electromagnetism course.

In 2006 I joined Graduate Dean Thomas Boyd and a small group of faculty to start a Nuclear Engineering program at CSM. This effort culminated in the approval of the M.S. and Ph. D. degrees by the Colorado Commission of Higher Education in the summer of 2007. The program was launched in the fall of 2007 and as of spring 2008 has 6 students with excellent prospects for growth in the future.

In 2007 I stepped down as Department Head and used a sabbatical in the Fall of 2007 to start a research effort into three body physics with my friend and colleague, Jim Shepard. This is an old problem that has been around from the dawn of nuclear physics, but little progress was made unitl the Faddeev's breakthrough in 1963 put the threory on a sound mathematical foundation. We have looked into combining renormalization group methods with separable expansions to develop accurate and efficient calculations of neutron-deuteron scattering with additional applications to cold atomic gases anticipated as well.

 Last Modified: August 22, 2005
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