Harald J. W. Mueller-Kirsten

Müller-Kirsten obtained the B.Sc. (First Class Honours) in 1957 and the Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Western Australia in Perth, where his doctoral advisor was Robert Balson Dingle. Thereafter he was postdoc at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich (Institute of F. Bopp) and obtained the habilitation there in 1971. Müller-Kirsten was an assistant professor at the American University of Beirut in 1967, NATO-Fellow at the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory in Berkeley in 1970, and Max-Kade-Foundation Fellow at SLAC, Stanford in 1974–75. In 1972 he was appointed Wissenschaftlicher Rat and professor (H2) at the University of Kaiserslautern, then there university professor (C2) and in 1995 university professor (C3).

Harald J.W. Mueller-Kirsten (born 1935) is a German Theoretical Physicist specializing in Quantum field theory, Quantum mechanics and Mathematical physics. He is known for his work on Asymptotic expansions of Mathieu functions, spheroidal wave functions, Lamé functions and ellipsoidal wave functions and their eigenvalues, Asymptotic expansions of Regge poles for Yukawa potentials, Eigenvalue and level-splitting formula for double-well potentials, Path integral method applied to anharmonic and periodic potentials, discovery that for anharmonic and periodic potentials the equation of small fluctuations around the classical solution is a Lamé equation, derivation of S-matrix and absorptivity for the singular potential 1 / r 4 {\displaystyle 1/r^{4}} (cf. modified Mathieu equation) and application to string theory, construction and quantization of gauge theory models, canonical quantization using Dirac bracket formalism in Hamiltonian formulation, BRST quantization and Faddeev-Jackiw quantization of field theory models with constraints and Supersymmetry.