Sin'ichirō Tomonaga

Sin'ichirō Tomonaga (朝永 振一郎)
Born	March 31, 1906 Tokyo, Japan
Died	July 8, 1979 (aged 73) Tokyo, Japan
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	Institute for Advanced Study Tokyo University of Education RIKEN
Alma mater	Kyoto Imperial University
Known for	Quantum electrodynamics
Notable awards	Asahi Prize (1946) Lomonosov Gold Medal (1964) Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)

Sin'ichirō 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^[1] along with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.

Biography

Tomonaga was born in Tokyo in 1906. He was the second child and eldest son of a Japanese philosopher, Tomonaga Sanjūrō. He entered the Kyoto Imperial University in 1926. Hideki Yukawa, also a Nobel Prize winner, was one of his classmates during undergraduate school. During graduate school at the same university, he worked as an assistant in the university for three years. After graduate school, he joined Nishina's group in Riken. In 1937, while working at Leipzig University (Leipzig), he collaborated with the research group of Werner Heisenberg. Two years later, he returned to Japan due to the outbreak of the Second World War, but finished his doctoral degree on the study of nuclear materials with his thesis on work he had done while in Leipzig.

In Japan, he was appointed to a professorship in the Tokyo University of Education (a forerunner of Tsukuba University). During the war he studied the magnetron, meson theory, and his "super-many-time" theory. In 1931, he became a researcher in Yoshio Nishina's laboratory at RIKEN. In 1948, he and his students re-examined a 1939 paper by Sidney Dancoff that attempted, but failed, to show that the infinite quantities that arise in QED can be canceled with each other. Tomonaga applied his super-many-time theory and a relativistic method based on the non-relativistic method of Wolfgang Pauli and Fierz to greatly speed up and clarify the calculations. Then he and his students found that Dancoff had overlooked one term in the perturbation series. With this term, the theory gave finite results; thus Tomonaga discovered the renormalization method independently of Julian Schwinger and calculated physical quantities such as the Lamb shift at the same time.

In the next year, he was invited by Robert Oppenheimer to work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He studied a many-body problem on the collective oscillations of a quantum-mechanical system. In the following year, he returned to Japan and proposed the Tomonaga-Luttinger liquid. In 1965, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics, with Julian Schwinger and Richard P. Feynman, for the study of QED, specifically for the discovery of the renormalization method. He died of throat cancer in Tokyo in 1979.

Tomonaga was married in 1940 to Ryōko Sekiguchi. They had two sons and one daughter. He was awarded the Order of Culture in 1952, and the Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun in 1976.

Books by Tomonaga

• Tomonaga, Sin-Itiro (1997). The Story of Spin. Oka, Takeshi (trans.). University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0-226-80794-0.

See also

• Progress of Theoretical Physics (Journal)
• List of Japanese Nobel laureates
• List of Nobel laureates affiliated with Kyoto University

References

1. Hayakawa, Satio (December 1979). "Obituary: Sin-itiro Tomonaga". Physics Today 32 (12): 66–68. Bibcode:1979PhT....32l..66H. doi:10.1063/1.2995326.

• Lundqvist, Stig, ed. (1998). Nobel Lectures in Physics (1963-1970). World Scientific. pp. 126–39. ISBN 981-02-3404-X.
• Schweber, Sylvan S. (1994). QED and the Men Who Made It: Dyson, Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga. Princeton University Press. ISBN 0-691-03327-7.
• Tomonaga's Nobel Prize Lecture.

External links

• Nobel Prize biography
• Electricity & Magnetism Pioneer Sin-Itiro Tomonaga
• Shinichiro Tomonaga
• Fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.