André Neveu

Who is André Neveu?

André Neveu is a French physicist working on string theory and quantum field theory who coinvented the Neveu-Schwarz algebra and the Gross-Neveu model.

Neveu studied in Paris at the École Normale Supérieure. In 1969 he received his diploma at Université Paris-Sud 11 in Orsay with Philippe Meyer and Claude Bouchiat and in 1971 he completed his doctorate there. In 1969 he and his classmate from ENS and Orsay, Joël Scherk, together with John H. Schwarz and David Gross at Princeton University, examined divergences in one-loop diagrams of the bosonic string theory. From 1971 to 1974 Neveu was at the Laboratory for High Energy Physics of the University of Paris XI where he and Scherk showed that spin-1 excitations of strings could describe Yang–Mills theories. In 1971, Neveu with John Schwarz in Princeton developed, at the same time as Pierre Ramond, the first string theory that also described fermions. This was an early appearance of the ideas of supersymmetry which were being developed independently at that time by several groups. A few year later, Neveu, working in Princeton with David Gross, developed the Gross–Neveu model. With Roger Dashen and Brosl Hasslacher, he examined, among other things, quantum-field-theoretic models of extended hadrons and semiclassical approximatons in quantum field theory which are reflected in the DHN method of the quantization of solitons. From 1972 to 1977 Neveu was at the Institute for Advanced Study while spending half of the time in Orsay. From 1974 to 1983 he was at the Laboratory for Theoretical Physics of the ENS and from 1983 to 1989 in the theory department at CERN. From 1975 he was Maitre de recherche in the CNRS and from 1985 Directeur de recherche. From 1989 he was at the Institute for Theoretical Physics of the University of Montpellier II. In 1994/5 he was a visiting professor in the University of California, Berkeley.