John Donoghue (physicist)

John Donoghue
Born	(1950-11-30) November 30, 1950 (age 74) Manhasset, New York
Alma mater	University of Notre Dame
Awards	Fellow of the American Physical Society
Scientific career
Fields	Physics, High Energy Physics, General Relativity
Institutions	University of Massachusetts Amherst
Doctoral advisor	Barry Holstein

John Francis Donoghue (born November 30, 1950) is an American theoretical physicist whose research primarily focuses on particle physics and general relativity, with a particular emphasis on the use of effective field theory methods. He is Distinguished Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

Education and career

John Donoghue was born on November 30, 1950, in Manhasset, New York. He received a B.S. in physics from the University of Notre Dame in 1972 and earned his Ph.D. in physics from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1976, with Barry Holstein as his advisor. Following postdoctoral appointments at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon University, Donoghue returned to UMass Amherst in 1980, where he spent the remainder of his academic career. He retired in 2015 but has continued his research. ^[1]

Research

Donoghue began his career during a period marked by the discovery of the charm and bottom quarks, initially focusing on the phenomenology of the quark model. His early work included studies of weak nonleptonic decays and tests of parity (P) and charge-parity (CP) symmetry violations. ^[2] He co-developed the DDH model ^[3] (named after Deplanques, Donoghue, and Holstein) for investigating parity non-conserving processes in nuclear interactions.

Donoghue’s work in particle phenomenology ^{[4] [5]} also contributed to the development of chiral perturbation theory, an effective field theory approach to low-energy quantum chromodynamics. These efforts were often conducted in collaboration with his UMass Amherst colleagues Barry Holstein and Eugene Golowich.

In the 1990s, building on his expertise in nonrenormalizable effective theories, Donoghue demonstrated that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity could be treated as a quantum effective field theory at low energies. ^[6] This work provided a framework for calculating quantum corrections to classical gravity in a model-independent way, without requiring a complete theory of quantum gravity.

In 1998, Donoghue co-authored a paper with V. Agrawal, S.M. Barr, and D. Seckel ^[7] that applied anthropic principle reasoning to the parameters of the Standard Model, contributing to the concept of multiverse and the landscape of possible physical laws.

Honors

In 1989, Donoghue was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society for his “continued contributions to the theory and phenomenology of hadrons, especially in the studies of weak decays, CP violation, hadron spectroscopy, and chiral symmetry.” ^[8] In 2005, he was awarded the UMass Amherst Chancellor’s Medal, ^[9] and in 2011 was named a Distinguished Professor. ^[10]

Bibliography

Donoghue is the author of over 300 scientific publications. ^[11]

He has also co-authored two textbooks:

• The Dynamics of the Standard Model ^[12] (with Eugene Golowich and Barry Holstein)
• A Prelude to Quantum Field Theory ^[13] (with Lorenzo Sorbo)

References

1. "John F. Donoghue -- INSPIRE".
2. Donoghue, John F.; Golowich, Eugene; Holstein, Barry R. (1986). "Low-energy weak interactions of quarks". Physics Reports. 131: 319–428. doi:10.1016/0370-1573(86)90151-1.
3. Desplanques, Bertrand; Donoghue, John F.; Holstein, Barry R. (February 1980). "Unified treatment of the parity violating nuclear force". Annals of Physics. 124 (2): 449–495. Bibcode:1980AnPhy.124..449D. doi:10.1016/0003-4916(80)90217-1.
4. Donoghue, John F.; Ramirez, Carlos; Valencia, GermanR. (April 1989). "Spectrum of QCD and chiral Lagrangians of the strong and weak interactions". Physical Review D. 39 (7): 1947–1955. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.39.1947.
5. Burdman, Gustavo; Donoghue, John F. (April 1992). "Union of chiral and heavy quark symmetries". Physics Letters B. 280 (3–4): 287–291. doi:10.1016/0370-2693(92)90068-F.
6. Donoghue, John F. (1994). "General relativity as an effective field theory: The leading quantum corrections". Physical Review D. 50 (6): 3874–3888. arXiv: gr-qc/9405057 . Bibcode:1994PhRvD..50.3874D. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.50.3874. PMID   10018030.
7. Agrawal, V.; Barr, Stephen M.; Donoghue, John F.; Seckel, D. (1998). "Viable range of the mass scale of the standard model". Physical Review D. 57 (9): 5480–5492. arXiv: hep-ph/9707380 . Bibcode:1998PhRvD..57.5480A. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.57.5480.
8. "Division of Particles and Fields Fellowship". American Physical Society. Retrieved 16 August 2025.
9. "UMass Amherst, College of Natural Sciences: Faculty Research Awards".
10. "John Donoghue's official webpage at UMass Amherst".
11. "John F. Donoghue -- INSPIRE".
12. Donoghue, John F.; Golowich, Eugene; Holstein, Barry R. (2023). The Dynamics of the Standard Model. Cambridge University Press. doi:10.1017/9781009291033. ISBN   978-1-009-29103-3.
13. Donoghue, John; Sorbo, Lorenzo (2022). A Prelude to Quantum Field Theory. Princeton University Press. Bibcode:2022pqft.book.....D.