[1][2] Jackson was a member of the National Academy of Sciences and was well known for his work in nuclear and particle physics,[3] as well as his widely used graduate text on classical electrodynamics.
[6] At McGill in the 1950s, in addition to appreciable teaching, Jackson found time for research on atomic processes and nuclear reactions at intermediate energies and the beginnings of his book on classical electricity and magnetism.
[1] While on leave at Princeton University, he found a fruitful collaboration with Sam Treiman and H. W. Wyld on weak interactions, particularly the various observable decay correlations in allowed nuclear beta decay involving the electron's momentum,[1] its spin, the neutrino's momentum, and the nuclear spin that provide information about parity conservation or non-conservation and time reversal conservation or not.
[8][9] He also published an early paper on the theoretical foundation for the then recently discovered muon-catalyzed fusion of hydrogen isotopes.
On sabbatical leave at CERN in 1963–64, he collaborated with Kurt Gottfried on production and decay of unstable resonances in high-energy hadronic collisions.
[12][13][1][14] They introduced the use of the density matrix to connect production mechanisms to the decay patterns and described the influence of competing processes ("absorption") on the reactions.
In the 1990s and beyond his time was increasingly devoted to semi-historical talks and publications on a variety of topics, with a foray into refuting suggestions that cancer may be caused by environmental radiation stemming from ubiquitous electronics use.
[25] His students include Hubert Reeves[13] Gordon L. Kane,[26] Robert N. Cahn (LBNL),[27] Richard D. Field and Chris Quigg.