Sin-Itiro Tomonaga
Shin'ichiro Tomonaga (朝 永 振 一郎jap, Tomonaga Shin'ichiro; born March 31, 1906 in Tokyo, † July 8, 1979 ) was a Japanese physicist.
He received in 1965 along with Richard P. Feynman and J. Schwinger the Nobel Prize in Physics "for their fundamental power in quantum electrodynamics, with deep implications for elementary particle physics."
Life and work
Tomonaga was born in 1906 in Tokyo. His family moved to Kyoto in 1913, where his father, from whom originates in Japan a known book on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, had become a professor of philosophy.
Tomonaga graduated in 1929 from, at the same time with a close friend, the Nobel Prize winner Hideki Yukawa, and then became the assistant of Yoshio Nishina ( the developer of the Klein-Nishina formula ). Tomonaga revered his teachers throughout his life and was even buried next to him. Under him, he started on quantum electrodynamics to work.
In a research period from 1937 to 1939 in Leipzig with Werner Heisenberg Tomonaga continued his work and began, in addition to dealing with nuclear physics. A study published in Germany work on the " Internal friction and thermal conductivity of nuclear matter ," he submitted after his return in 1939 at the University of Tokyo as a doctoral thesis. In 1941 he became professor of physics at the Humanities and Natural Sciences University of Tokyo ( later Tokyo University of Education, now the University of Tsukuba ).
Tomonaga worked on the meson theory of nuclei ( "Intermediate coupling theory" ) and in 1942 introduced its own covariant formulation of quantum field theory ago - much earlier than Julian Schwinger and Richard Feynman, with whom he then in 1965 shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.
As chair Tomonaga employed during the war with radar research (waveguide, cavity resonators, magnetron theory). After the war he continued his work on quantum electrodynamics and developed independently of the Schwinger renormalization.
In 1949 he was invited by Robert Oppenheimer at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked on the quantum-mechanical many-body theory and be the first to exactly solvable one-dimensional models of systems of charged fermions, the Tomonaga - Luttinger liquids, the nature of collective excitations in such systems enlightening.
At the University of Tokyo Tomonaga built in 1955, the Institute of Nuclear Physics on. 1956-1962 he was both president of the Tokyo University of Education (now Tsukuba University ) and Director of the Japanese Science Council and otherwise an influential government adviser. From 1963 he was director of the Institute of Optics University.
Tomonaga wrote in 1949 a textbook on quantum mechanics, which was translated into English in 1963.
In 1946 he was awarded the Asahi Prize, in 1948 the price of the Japan Academy, 1963, the Lomonosov Gold Medal and 1980 for Butsurigaku to wa nan daro ka (物理学とは 何 だろ う か) the Osaragi - Jiro Prize. He was elected in 1964 as a member of the German Academy of Sciences Leopoldina.
Tomonaga married in 1940 and had two sons and a daughter.