Raymond F. Bishop is Professor of Theoretical Physics in the Theoretical Physics Group of the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Manchester.  In 2005 he was awarded the Eugene Feenberg Memorial Prize in Many-Body Physics, with a citation that reads “for his development of the coupled-cluster method toward a comprehensive ab initio approach, and innovative applications across the full spectrum of subfields of quantum many-body physics.” The Feenberg Prize is the premier international award in Professor Bishop’s field of research, and he was the first awardee from a British university.  A major international conference on Microscopic Approaches to Many-Body Theory, attended by leading experts from nearly 20 different countries, was also held in Manchester in 2005 to honour his achievements.

Professor Bishop’s main field of research has been microscopic quantum many-body theory and its applications to systems in nuclear physics, subnuclear physics and quantum field theory, condensed matter physics, quantum fluids and ultra-dense matter, statistical physics, and quantum information theory.  He has authored over 200 refereed publications in these fields.  He is particularly well known internationally for his pioneering work in developing and applying the coupled cluster method (CCM) to the point where it is now widely acknowledged as providing one of the most pervasive, most powerful, and most successful of all fully microscopic formulations of quantum many-body theory.  It has been applied to more systems in quantum field theory, quantum chemistry, nuclear, subnuclear, condensed matter and other areas of physics than any other competing method, where it has yielded numerical results which are among the most accurate available.  The application of the CCM to strongly-correlated low-dimensional quantum magnets and other modern materials is a major direction of his current research work.

Since 1980 Professor Bishop has also given around 250 talks on his research, more than half of which have been papers at international conferences (the majority of which were invited plenary or keynote talks), and some 100 or so of which have been invited seminars or colloquia at universities or research institutes in some 25 countries.  Over the years he has had many productive collaborations with colleagues in such countries as Spain, Germany, Finland, Poland, Czech Republic, India, Japan, and USA.

BA (Class I Hons.) in Natural Sciences (Physics), Oxon. (1966)

MA, Oxon. (1970)

PhD in Theoretical Physics, Stanford, USA (1971)

FIMA, Fellow of the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications

FInstP, Fellow of the Institute of Physics

Fellow, American Physical Society

CMath, Chartered Mathematician

CPhys, Chartered Physicist

CSci, Chartered Scientist

My main field of research is microscopic quantum many-body theory and its applications to systems in nuclear physics, subnuclear physics and quantum field theory, condensed matter physics, quantum fluids and ultra-dense matter, statistical physics, and quantum information theory.

Examples of quantum many-body systems abound in Nature. Thus, it is clear that in fields like molecular, solid-state, and nuclear physics most of the fundamental objects of discourse are interacting many-body systems. But even in elementary particle physics one is usually dealing with more than one particle. For example, at some level of reality a nucleon comprises three quarks interacting via gluons and surrounded by a cloud of mesons, which are themselves made of quark-antiquark pairs. Even more fundamentally, even the “physical vacuum” of any quantum field theory is endowed with an enormously complex infinite many-body structure due to virtual excitations. A key central role in modern physics is thus occupied by quantum many-body theory, where we are especially interested in the possible existence of any universal techniques that are powerful enough to treat the full range of many-body and field-theoretic systems. One such method is the coupled cluster method, which my collaborators and I have pioneered. This has become one of the most pervasive (possibly the most pervasive), most powerful, and most successful of all fully microscopic formulations of quantum many-body theory. It has been applied to more systems in quantum field theory, quantum chemistry, nuclear, subnuclear, condensed matter and other areas of physics than any other competing method. It has yielded numerical results which are among the most accurate available for an incredibly wide range of both finite and extended systems on either a spatial continuum or a regular discrete lattice.  The further development and applications of the coupled cluster method remains one of my primary research interests.

Specific examples of problems and topics on which I have worked include:

• dense nuclear (and baryonic) matter, and
• neutron stars and beta-stable matter;
• finite atomic nuclei;
• hypernuclei and hypernuclear matter, and
• the general problem of impurities in Fermi systems;
• a two-fluid model of nuclear rotations and surface vibrations;
• translationally-invariant cluster methods in coordinate space, as an efficient alternative to shell-model expansions;
• the electron liquid and electron correlations (metals and plasmas), and
• other Coulombic liquids;
• the liquids ³He and ⁴He;
• condensation in interacting Bose systems, and
• the general theory of critical phenomena;
• pairing and higher-order clustering in Fermi systems;
• constrained variational theories of dense quantum liquids;
• general development of the coupled cluster method, and its applications to
• anharmonic oscillators and nonlinear systems in quantum field theory,
• quantum (antiferro)magnets and low-dimensional quantum spin arrays,
• strongly correlated lattice electrons, e.g., the Hubbard model,
• lattice gauge field theories, e.g., U(1), Z(2), SU(2) models,
• chiral lattice field theories, and
• the Rabi Hamiltonian and other models in quantum optics, quantum electronics, and solid-state optoelectronics;
• the development of the extended coupled cluster method, and its applications to
• a generalised bosonisation procedure as an exact mapping of quantum many-body/field theory into classical Hamiltonian mechanics,
• an exact hierarchical generalisation of the random-phase approximation for many-body mean fields,
• the holomorphic representati

• Theoretical Physics

Since coming to Manchester I have supervised the doctoral studies of some 20 postgraduate students who have successfully submitted theses and been awarded their PhD degrees. Over the same period I have also worked with and mentored approximately 20 postdoctoral research associates whom I have funded from research grants awarded to me by various grant-awarding bodies (– mostly EPSRC and its predecessors), and whose careers I have successfully managed.

I always welcome enquires from well-qualified prospective postgraduate students interested in my fields of research.