LSU Mourns the Loss of World-Renowned Physicist Robert F. O’Connell

The LSU community lost one of its internationally respected faculty members when LSU Boyd Professor Emeritus Robert F. O’Connell passed away on March 24, 2026.

“Bob O'Connell was a legend that laid the foundation for our department's excellence in quantum physics and astrophysics,” said Jeffery Blackmon Department Chair LSU Physics & Astronomy and Russell B. Long Professor.  “He made foundational discoveries in quantum statistical mechanics and major contributions to a wide variety of fields including optics, astrophysics, and subatomic physics. Over his 53-year career at LSU, he published more than 350 papers, and his close collaboration with Eugene Wigner produced important discoveries and papers with more than 1,000 citations. His high standards always pushed our department towards excellence, and his passing leaves an indelible mark.”

He was named Distinguished Research Master at LSU in 1975 and was appointed Boyd Professor (the highest rank at LSU) in 1986. He also served as the Vice-President and the President of the Faculty Senate at LSU. He has been a Fellow of the American Physical Society since 1969. In order to further his research, he accepted invitations to various institutions. Initially, he accepted a two-year NAS-NRC award at the NASA Institute for Space Studies, New York. Next, he obtained the SRC visiting fellowship which enabled him to spend a year at the University of Oxford and Queen Mary College, London (1975-76). He later spent a summer at the Institute for Astronomy at the Cambridge University and many other summers at the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics, Garching and the University of Santa Caterina, Brazil, the Technical University of Denmark, the Universities of Paris, Orsay, Rome and Bilkent, Ankara, as well as the Lawrence Livermore Laboratory. 

Dr. O’Connell was inducted into the College of Science Hall of Distinction in 2018. In 2023 the Department celebrated his scientific journey on his 90th birthday. More details on his contributions can be found in the On the interface of quantum and statistical physics and relativity workshop webpage. 

He enjoyed extended summer collaborations over a period of 25 years at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and the University of Ulm. One of the many pathbreaking discoveries of Dr. O’Connell is his prediction of the relativistic spin precession of ~ 5 degrees in the double binary pulsar in General Relativity which was verified observationally (Science, 321, 104 (2008)).