Bruce McKellar

Treasurer

Bruce McKellar is an Australian physicist. He currently serves as past-president of IUPAP.

He has been a lecturer at the University of Sydney, and a professor of theoretical physics at the University of Melbourne.

He has also held visiting position at the Institute of Advanced Studies, Princeton (USA), at the French Atomic Energy Commission, Saclay (France), the TRIUMF Laboratories (Canada), the University of Washington (Seattle, United States), the Los Alamos Laboratory (United States), CERN (Switzerland), the Yukawa Institute (Japan), the National Taiwan University, the National University of Singapore, the Australian National University and Adelaide University.

He worked on weak interactions, calculating the parity violation expected in nuclei. He also started his work on three and many body nuclear forces. It was characteristic of this work that he was applying the current algebra techniques of particle physics to obtain results about nuclei. During his time at the University of Melbourne, McKellar and his collaborators published his definitive study on three nucleon forces, known as the “Tucson-Melbourne” force. His work on weak interactions led to calculation of the electric dipole moments expected for the nucleon and atoms in various models of these interactions. This work then evolved into studies of related effects in the B meson system.

McKellar and his students also did foundational work on the behaviour of neutrinos propagating through a dense background of neutrinos as one finds in the early universe. He is well known for the “He McKellar Wilkens” phase, a seminal quantum physics result predicted by He and McKellar, and Wilkens (independently) in 1993–94.

McKellar has made significant contribution to the development of the study of physics in Australia. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Science in 1987. He was a founding member of the Australian Research Council, McKellar is a Fellow of the Australian Institute of Physics,

Read his Wikipedia notice.