John Cornwall

John Michael Cornwall (born 19 August 1934 in Denver, Colorado) is an American theoretical physicist who does research on elementary particle physics and quantum field theory as well as geophysics and physics of near-space. He is known for the Pinch Technique.

Cornwall graduated from Harvard University with a bachelor's degree in 1956 and from the University of Denver with a master's degree in 1959. He graduated in 1962 from the University of California, Berkeley with a doctorate under the supervision of Malvin Ruderman. Cornwall was a postdoctoral fellow at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) and from 1963 to 1965 at the Institute for Advanced Study. At the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) he became in 1965 an assistant professor and in 1974 a full professor.

Cornwall published with Richard E. Norton in 1973 one of the earliest papers on dynamic symmetry breaking in Yang-Mills theories. In the later part of his career he has worked on non-perturbative quantum chromodynamics. the New York Academy of Sciences, the American Geophysical Union, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Selected publications with Joannis Papavassiliou, Daniele Binosi: The pinch technique and applications to non-abelian gauge theories, Cambridge University Press 2011 with Richard E. Norton: On the formalism of relativistic many body theory, Annals of Physics, Vol. 91, 1975, p. 106 with Roman Jackiw, E. Tomboulis: "Effective action for composite operators", Physical Review D, vol. 10, 1974, pp. 2428-2445 with G. Tiktopoulos: On-shell asymptotics of non-abelian gauge fields, Phys. Rev. Lett., vol. 35, 1975, p. 338 with G. Tiktopoulos: Infrared Behavior of non-abelian gauge theories, Phys. Rev. D, vol. 13, 1976, pp. 3370-3397 ; part 2, Phys. Rev. D, Vol. 15, 1977, 2397 Dynamical mass generation in continuum quantum chromodynamics, Phys. Rev. D, Vol. 26, 1982, p. 1453 Ein Zufluchtsort für den Wahnsinn. In: Will Hall, Jenseits der Psychiatrie – Stimmen und Visionen des Wahnsinns im Madness Radio. Berlin & Lancaster: Peter Lehmann Publishing 2023, pp. 158-162. ,