John Hubbard (physicist)
John Hubbard (born 27 October 1931 in London, † November 27, 1980 in San Jose) was a British physicist who was concerned with theoretical solid state physics and many-body physics.
He studied physics at Imperial College London with a bachelor's degree in 1955 and his doctorate ( Ph.D.) in 1958 Stanley Raimes. His dissertation was on the description of collective excitations in the many-electron problem in metals and plasmas. He was since 1955 in the Theory Group of the Atomic Energy Research Establishment ( AERE ) at Harwell (England), then under the direction of Brian Flowers (later by Walter Marshall). In 1961 he took over the management of the solid state theory group. He remained until 1976 in Harwell and worked from 1976 to 1980 at the IBM Research Laboratory in San Jose, California ( and at Brown University).
Most of his research was in the area of the theory of magnetism. Especially by the eponymous Hubbard model of strongly correlated electrons it is still one of the most cited researchers in theoretical solid state physics. Similar models found around the same time also Ryogo Kubo and Takeo Izuyama in Japan and Martin Gutzwiller, treatment by Hubbard, however, was the way for future research. The Hubbard - Stratonovich transformation in path integrals and distribution functions of statistical mechanics was introduced by him and Ruslan Stratonowitsch late 1950s. Most recently, he worked in San José on problems of magnetism of iron and nickel and one-dimensional conductors and critical phenomena ( universality of phase transitions ).
He was portrayed as a very cautious and quixotic, possibly contributed to the his achievements during his lifetime through memberships (he was not a Fellow of the Royal Society ) and awards were only appreciated insufficient. For example, his thesis contained a fundamental advance in the treatment of many-electron systems with Feynman diagrams. When Hubbard went to Harwell asked his boss Brian Flowers where this would have been published and when he was told, Hubbard would have refrained because now others had come to similar conclusions, he insisted on immediate publication. That he wanted to work rather withdrawn, was also a reason why he left in 1976 after a reorganization of the Harwell research facility.