Robert Mills (physicist)

Robert Laurence Mills
Robert Laurence Mills
Born	April 15, 1927 Englewood, New Jersey
Died	October 27, 1999 (aged 72) East Charleston, Vermont
Alma mater	Columbia University
Known for	Yang–Mills theory
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical physics, quantum field theory

Robert Laurence Mills (April 15, 1927 – October 27, 1999) was an American physicist, specializing in quantum field theory, the theory of alloys, and many-body theory. While sharing an office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Chen-Ning Yang and Robert Mills formulated in 1954 a theory now known as the Yang–Mills theory – "the foundation for current understanding of how subatomic particles interact, a contribution which has restructured modern physics and mathematics."^[1]

Mathematically, Yang and Mills proposed a tensor equation for what are now called Yang–Mills fields (this equation reduces to Maxwell's equations as a special case; see gauge theory):

${\displaystyle \partial _{\mu }F^{\mu \nu }+2\epsilon (b_{\mu }\times F^{\mu \nu })=J^{\nu }}$.