Bahram Mashhoon

Bahram Mashhoon
بهرام مشحون
Mashhoon in 2017
Mashhoon in 2017
Born (1947-09-09) 9 September 1947
Tehran
NationalityIranian-American
Alma materPrinceton University
Known for
  • The Mashhoon effect
  • Gravitomagnetism
  • Quasinormal modes of black holes
  • Locality in relativity theory
  • Nonlocal gravity
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsTheoretical physics
InstitutionsUniversity of Missouri
Thesis The Gravitational and Electromagnetic Interactions of a Black Hole
Doctoral advisorJohn Archibald Wheeler

Bahram Mashhoon (Persian: بهرام مشحون, born 9 September 1947, Tehran, Iran) is an Iranian-American theoretical physicist renowned for his contributions to the fields of special and general relativity. He holds the title of Professor Emeritus of Physics in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Missouri in Columbia, where he served from 1985 until 2015.  After retirement in 2015, he returned to Tehran in 2017. He currently serves as an adjunct professor in the School of Astronomy of the Institute for Research in Fundamental Sciences (IPM) in Tehran, Iran. He has also been active in teaching and research at the Sharif University of Technology in Tehran, where he is an adjunct professor of physics as well.

Early life and education

Bahram Mashhoon was born in Tehran, Iran, on 9 September 1947. His father, Hassan Mashhoon, was a historian and the author of the book ''History of Iranian Music". Bahram Mashhoon completed his education at Alborz High School in Tehran before relocating to the United States in 1966 to study physics. In 1969, he earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Physics from the University of California - Berkeley, where his mentor was Emilio Segrè, followed by a Ph.D. in Physics from Princeton University in 1972. His doctoral dissertation titled ''The Gravitational and Electromagnetic Interactions of a Black Hole" was completed under the supervision of John Archibald Wheeler.

Career and research

After completing his Ph.D., he briefly served on the physics faculty of Arya-Mehr University (now Sharif University of Technology) in Tehran before returning to Princeton University as a research associate in 1973. He continued his research as a postdoctoral fellow and research associate within the relativity groups of Maryland and Utah from 1974 to 1978. Subsequently, he held positions as a lecturer and research fellow at Caltech from 1978 to 1980 before joining the gravitation group led by Friedrich W. Hehl in Cologne, Germany, from 1980 to 1985. In 1985, he was appointed as an associate professor of physics at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where he held the position of professor of physics from 1995 until his retirement in 2015.

Throughout his career, he has made significant contributions to the theoretical exploration of various topics in gravitational physics including the quasinormal modes of black holes[1][2], gravitomagnetism[3], tidal dynamics[4][5][6], gravitational waves, and cosmology[7].

In 1988, Mashhoon proposed that the intrinsic spin of a particle couples with the rotation of an observer in a specific way given by the spin-rotation Hamiltonian.[8] Its existence is due to the inertia of intrinsic spin. This novel interaction is known as the Mashhoon effect. In interferometry, the spin-rotation coupling in general appears in addition to the Sagnac effect that is due to the coupling of orbital angular momentum with rotation. The Mashhoon effect has been experimentally confirmed in neutron interferometry.[9] The applications of the new effect extend from the phenomenon of phase wrap-up in the Global Positioning System (GPS)[10] to the spin-vorticity coupling in spintronics.[11]

In 1993, Mashhoon introduced a nonlocal theory of accelerated systems in Minkowski spacetime.[12][13] This theory extends the conventional framework of special relativity for accelerated observers by addressing the limitations of the locality assumption. Subsequently, he pursued the development of a nonlocal theory of gravitation in collaboration with Friedrich W. Hehl, who suggested an indirect approach inspired by an analogy with the nonlocal electrodynamics of media.[14][15] A comprehensive account of this theory of nonlocal gravity is contained in Mashhoon's book[16] and numerous astrophysical and cosmological implications of this theory have been investigated in connection with dark matter and dark energy.

Awards and recognition

Books

  • Nonlocal gravity[16] (2017): This book begins with the concept of nonlocality in special relativity and progresses to explore nonlocal effects in gravitation. It presents a novel theory of nonlocal gravity, based on analogies between electrodynamics and general relativity. Finally, it demonstrates that these nonlocal effects can, in principle, simulate the behavior of dark matter in galactic and cosmological scales.
  • در جست و جوی فهم کیهان (in Persian, 2024)[17]: The authors of this book are Bahram Mashhoon and Shant Baghram. This book is based on the lectures Mashhoon delivers for the Introduction to Cosmology course offered to undergraduate students at Sharif University of Technology.

Bibliometric information

As of August 2025, Mashhoon has an h-index of 57, with over 10,000 citations.[18] His tori index and riq index are 134 and 210, respectively.[19]

References

  1. ^ Ferrari, Valeria; Mashhoon, Bahram (1984-04-16). "Oscillations of a Black Hole". Physical Review Letters. 52 (16): 1361–1364. Bibcode:1984PhRvL..52.1361F. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.52.1361.
  2. ^ Ferrari, Valeria; Mashhoon, Bahram (1984-07-15). "New approach to the quasinormal modes of a black hole". Physical Review D. 30 (2): 295–304. Bibcode:1984PhRvD..30..295F. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.30.295.
  3. ^ Mashhoon, Bahram (2008-04-17), Gravitoelectromagnetism: A Brief Review, arXiv:gr-qc/0311030, arXiv:gr-qc/0311030
  4. ^ Mashhoon, B. (1977-09-10). "Tidal radiation". The Astrophysical Journal. 216: 591–609. Bibcode:1977ApJ...216..591M. doi:10.1086/155500. ISSN 0004-637X.
  5. ^ Mashhoon, B. (1978-07-10). "On tidal resonance". The Astrophysical Journal. 223: 285–298. Bibcode:1978ApJ...223..285M. doi:10.1086/156262. ISSN 0004-637X.
  6. ^ Mashhoon, Bahram; Theiss, Dietmar S. (1982-11-22). "Relativistic Tidal Forces and the Possibility of Measuring Them". Physical Review Letters. 49 (21): 1542–1545. Bibcode:1982PhRvL..49.1542M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.49.1542.
  7. ^ Hehl, Friedrich W.; Lämmerzahl, Claus (2008-05-01). "Bahram Mashhoon's 60th birthday". General Relativity and Gravitation. 40 (5): 881–893. Bibcode:2008GReGr..40..881H. doi:10.1007/s10714-007-0593-1. ISSN 1572-9532.
  8. ^ Mashhoon, Bahram (1988-12-05). "Neutron interferometry in a rotating frame of reference". Physical Review Letters. 61 (23): 2639–2642. Bibcode:1988PhRvL..61.2639M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.61.2639. PMID 10039184.
  9. ^ Danner, Armin; Demirel, Bülent; Kersten, Wenzel; Lemmel, Hartmut; Wagner, Richard; Sponar, Stephan; Hasegawa, Yuji (2020-02-14). "Spin-rotation coupling observed in neutron interferometry". npj Quantum Information. 6 (1): 23. arXiv:1904.07085. Bibcode:2020npjQI...6...23D. doi:10.1038/s41534-020-0254-8. ISSN 2056-6387.
  10. ^ Ashby, Neil (2003-01-28). "Relativity in the Global Positioning System". Living Reviews in Relativity. 6 (1) 1. Bibcode:2003LRR.....6....1A. doi:10.12942/lrr-2003-1. ISSN 1433-8351. PMC 5253894. PMID 28163638.
  11. ^ Nozaki, Yukio; Sukegawa, Hiroaki; Watanabe, Shinichi; Yunoki, Seiji; Horaguchi, Taisuke; Nakayama, Hayato; Yamanoi, Kazuto; Wen, Zhenchao; He, Cong; Song, Jieyuan; Ohkubo, Tadakatsu; Mitani, Seiji; Maezawa, Kazuki; Nishikawa, Daichi; Fujii, Shun (2025-12-31). "Gyro-spintronic material science using vorticity gradient in solids". Science and Technology of Advanced Materials. 26 (1): 2428153. doi:10.1080/14686996.2024.2428153. ISSN 1468-6996. PMC 11864018. PMID 40012583.
  12. ^ Mashhoon, Bahram (1993-05-01). "Nonlocal theory of accelerated observers". Physical Review A. 47 (5): 4498–4501. Bibcode:1993PhRvA..47.4498M. doi:10.1103/PhysRevA.47.4498. PMID 9909459.
  13. ^ Mashhoon, B. (2008). "Nonlocal special relativity". Annalen der Physik. 520 (9–10): 705–727. doi:10.1002/andp.200852009-1007. ISSN 1521-3889.
  14. ^ Hehl, Friedrich W.; Mashhoon, Bahram (2009-03-26). "Formal framework for a nonlocal generalization of Einstein's theory of gravitation". Physical Review D. 79 (6): 064028. arXiv:0902.0560. Bibcode:2009PhRvD..79f4028H. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.79.064028.
  15. ^ Hehl, Friedrich W.; Mashhoon, Bahram (2009-03-30). "Nonlocal gravity simulates dark matter". Physics Letters B. 673 (4): 279–282. arXiv:0812.1059. Bibcode:2009PhLB..673..279H. doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2009.02.033. ISSN 0370-2693.
  16. ^ a b Mashhoon, Bahram (2017). Nonlocal gravity. International series of monographs on physics. Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford university press. ISBN 978-0-19-880380-5.
  17. ^ "در جستجوی فهم کیهان - نشرنو" (in Persian). Retrieved 2025-08-17.
  18. ^ "Google Scholar". scholar.google.com. Retrieved 2025-08-17.
  19. ^ "Astrophysics Data System". ui.adsabs.harvard.edu. Retrieved 2025-08-17.


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