Mannque Rho, a world-renowned theoretical nuclear physicist from the Republic of Korea and distinguished member of the Institut de Physique Théorique (IPhT) at CEA Saclay, passed away in Paris on 19 March 2026, at the age of 89.
Born on 14 December 1936 in Hamyang, Gyeongnam Province, Rho was the eldest of eight children. He initially studied political science at Seoul National University and later moved to the US, completing his undergraduate education at Clark University with a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry in 1960. He obtained his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, on 21 October 1963.
At Berkeley, Rho met Vincent Gillet, who invited him to take up a postdoctoral position at the Service de Physique Théorique (SPhT), the predecessor of IPhT at CEA Saclay. He moved to France in 1964 on a Joliot-Curie fellowship, to work at the Laboratoire Joliot-Curie in Orsay and at the SPhT. There, he joined the theoretical nuclear-physics team led by Claude Bloch, becoming a permanent member on 1 June 1965. This institute remained his intellectual home throughout his career.
Rho’s work spanned chiral symmetry in nuclear media, effective field theories and topological approaches to strongly interacting matter. In the early 1970s, he initiated a long-lasting collaboration with Gerald E Brown at Stony Brook University. Together, in 1979, they developed the “little bag” model, providing a conceptual bridge between quark degrees of freedom and the pion cloud surrounding nucleons.
He is best-known for the Brown–Rho scaling (1991), which describes the in-medium modification of hadron masses in hot and/or dense matter. This influential result has shaped modern approaches to dense nuclear matter, with important implications for heavy-ion collisions and neutron-star physics. Rho also made major contributions to the construction of effective field theories rooted in quantum chromodynamics, and conducted pioneering work on skyrmion matter and hidden local symmetries.
Over his career, Rho published more than 200 scientific articles, which have received over 11,000 citations. He authored the Chiral Nuclear Dynamics trilogy (with Maciej A Nowak, Ismail Zahed and Yong-Liang Ma) and edited several volumes of collected works.
Rho held visiting positions at leading institutions worldwide, including CERN, Stony Brook University, Seoul National University and the University of Tokyo – as a JSPS professor. He served as professor at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study and chair professor at Hanyang University.
His scientific achievements were recognised through numerous honours: the Paul Langevin Prize (1985), the Gay-Lussac–Humboldt Prize (1995), the Korean National Academy of Sciences Award (1999) and the Ho-Am Prize (2002). He received the Order of Civil Merit in 1997, an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Clark University in 2003 and the KBS Overseas Korean Award in 2004. He was a member of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology.
Remarkably, Rho remained scientifically active into his final years, working on superdense baryonic matter as recently as November 2025. The IPhT deeply regrets his loss, but his legacy will endure in theoretical nuclear physics. We extend sincere condolences to his family, colleagues and students.
