Sin-Itiro Tomonaga
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Sin-Itiro Tomonaga or Shinichirō Tomonaga (朝永 振一郎 Tomonaga Shin'ichirō, March 31, 1906–July 8, 1979) was a Japanese physicist, influential in the development of quantum electrodynamics, work for which he was jointly awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1965 along with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.
Biography
In 1906, he was born in Tokyo as the first boy of a Japanese philosopher, Sanjūrō Tomonaga. He entered the Kyoto imperial university in 1926. Yukawa Hideki, who is also a Nobel Prize winner, is one of his classfellows in their undergraduate days. After graduate he worked as an assistant in the university for three years, and then he join in Nishina's group in Riken. Since 1937, working in Leipzig, he collaborated with Werner Heisenberg's research group. Two years after, he returned to Japan because of outbreak of Second World War and then he finished a degree by his study about nuclear materials.In Japan he was appointed to a professorship in Tsukuba University. During the war he studied magnetron, the meson theory and his super-many-time theory. In 1948, he applied his super-many-time theory to QED and he found the renormalization recipe independently of Julian Schwinger. In the next year, he was invited by Robert Oppenheimer to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He studyed a many-body problem in physics there. In the following year, he returned to Japan again and he proposed the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid in the same year. In 1965, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for his study of QED, i.e., for the discover of the renormalization theory. He passed away in Tokyo, 1979.
Anecdote
He did a rakugo in the German language in a campus festival of the University of Tokyo. This episode shows his sophisticated aspect.
He respected Yoshio Nishina as his teacher in physics through his life. Now his tomb is at the next one of that of Yoshio Nishina and the epitaph on his tombstone tells "He is laid down with his teacher".
Book
- Schweber, Sylvan S., 1994. QED and the men who made it : Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga. Princeton Univ. Press.
External links
- [Nobel Prize biography]
- [Shinichiro Tomonaga]
- [fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.]
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