Robert Mills (physicist)

Robert Laurence Mills (April 15, 1927 – October 27, 1999) was an American physicist, specializing in quantum field theory, the theory of alloys, and many-body theory.

While sharing an office at Brookhaven National Laboratory, Frank Yang Chen-Ning and Robert Mills formulated in 1954 a theory now known as the Yang–Mills theory – "the foundation for current understanding of how subatomic particles interact, a contribution which has restructured modern physics and mathematics."

Mathematically, Yang and Mills proposed a tensor equation for what are now called Yang–Mills fields (this equation reduces to Maxwell's equations as a special case; see gauge theory):

${\displaystyle \partial _{\mu }F^{\mu \nu }+2\epsilon (b_{\mu }\times F^{\mu \nu })=J^{\nu }}$.