Department of Physics and Astronomy McMaster University Hamilton, ON L8S 4M1 Office: ABB-147 Phone: (905) 525-9140 x23188 FAX: (905) 546-1252 E-mail:
Donald Sprung graduated with a B.A. in Mathematics and Physics from Univ. of Toronto in 1957,
winning a silver medal for the best standing in a science programme. A Rotary International
Fellowship took him to Birmingham in the U.K. where he obtained his Ph.D. under the supervision
of G.E. Brown and Sir Rudolf Peierls. Following a post-doctoral year with Hans Bethe at Cornell,
he joined the McMaster faculty in 1962. Research leaves have taken him to M.I.T. in 1964-5,
Orsay in 1969-70, Tuebingen in 1980-81, Japan, China and Australia in 1985-6, Mainz in 1990
and Barcelona in 1991 and 1995. The year in Orsay was supported by a Fellowship from the C.D.
Howe Foundation; it lead to many years of collaboration with Xavier Campi and Joan Martorell, as
well as a taste for reading the satirical weekly le canard enchainee.
He served as Dean of the Faculty of Science from 1975-84, and Chair of the Department of Physics
and Astronomy from 1991-97. Notable honours include the Herzberg Medal of
the CAP in 1972, Fellowship of the Royal Society of Canada in 1980, and the CAP Gold
Medal for Achievement in Physics, in 1997. In 2009 he was elected a Fellow of the
American Physical Society, cited for his work on nuclear forces and the long range structure of the
deuteron. In 2010 he was elected a Fellow of the Institute of Physics (London).
A recurring theme of his research has been the nucleon-nucleon interaction and its role in nuclear
structure. In the 1960's, with M.K. Srivastava, the super-soft core potential model was discovered.
This was developed into a realistic potential that has been widely used in three-body calculations.
Out of nuclear matter studies, an "effective interaction" was developed and applied in
Hartree-Fock calculations with X. Campi in the 1970's. They were deeply involved in the development
of "model-independent" methods for deducing the density profile of real nuclei from
elastic electron scattering data. In the 1980's, a series of papers with S. Klarsfeld and
J. Martorell related the properties of the deuteron to the long distance part of the nuclear force.
Since 1990, he has spent most of his time on problems related to optics and condensed matter,
in particular nanometer scale devices in which a two-dimensional electron gas is further confined
to make quantum wires or quantum dots, in which electrons propagate as waves rather than as
particles. More recently, with Gregory Morozov, the design of anti-reflection coatings for
electrons passsing through a layered system has been solved. A semiclassical coupled waves theory for
a one-dimensional photonic crystal was developed. In collaboration with J. G. Muga and J. Martorell
the origin of non-exponential decay in quantum mechanics has been elucidated.
The following list contains some representative publications.
The most recent ones are found in the separate list of publications.