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Shin'ichirō Tomonaga

Japanese physicist (1906-1979)

Shin'ichirō Tomonaga
Tomonaga in 1965
Born	(1906-03-31)March 31, 1906 Tokyo, Japan
Died	July 8, 1979(1979-07-08) (aged 73) Tokyo, Japan
Alma mater	Kyoto Imperial University
Known for	Quantum electrodynamics Schwinger–Tomonaga equation Tomonaga–Luttinger liquid
Awards	Asahi Prize (1946) Lomonosov Gold Medal (1964) Nobel Prize in Physics (1965)
Scientific career
Fields	Theoretical physics
Institutions	Leipzig University Institute for Advanced Study Tokyo University of Education RIKEN University of Tokyo

Quantum field theory
Feynman diagram
History
Background Field theory Electromagnetism Weak force Strong force Quantum mechanics Special relativity General relativity Gauge theory Yang–Mills theory
Symmetries Symmetry in quantum mechanics C-symmetry P-symmetry T-symmetry Lorentz symmetry Poincaré symmetry Gauge symmetry Explicit symmetry breaking Spontaneous symmetry breaking Noether charge Topological charge
Tools Anomaly Background field method BRST quantization Correlation function Crossing Effective action Effective field theory Expectation value Feynman diagram Lattice field theory LSZ reduction formula Partition function Propagator Quantization Regularization Renormalization Vacuum state Wick's theorem
Equations Dirac equation Klein–Gordon equation Proca equations Wheeler–DeWitt equation Bargmann–Wigner equations
Standard Model Quantum electrodynamics Electroweak interaction Quantum chromodynamics Higgs mechanism
Incomplete theories String theory Supersymmetry Technicolor Theory of everything Quantum gravity
Scientists Adler Anderson Anselm Bargmann Becchi Belavin Bell Berezin Bethe Bjorken Bleuer Bogoliubov Brodsky Brout Buchholz Cachazo Callan Coleman Dashen DeWitt Dirac Doplicher Dyson Englert Faddeev Fadin Fayet Fermi Feynman Fierz Fock Frampton Fritzsch Fröhlich Fredenhagen Furry Glashow Gelfand Gell-Mann Glimm Goldstone Gribov Gross Gupta Guralnik Haag Heisenberg Hepp Higgs Hagen 't Hooft Iliopoulos Ivanenko Jackiw Jaffe Jona-Lasinio Jordan Jost Källén Kendall Kinoshita Klebanov Kontsevich Kuraev Landau Lee Lehmann Leutwyler Lipatov Łopuszański Low Lüders Maiani Majorana Maldacena Migdal Mills Møller Naimark Nambu Neveu Nishijima Oehme Oppenheimer Osterwalder Parisi Pauli Peskin Plefka Polyakov Pomeranchuk Popov Proca Rubakov Ruelle Salam Schrader Schwarz Schwinger Segal Seiberg Semenoff Shifman Shirkov Skyrme Sommerfield Stora Stueckelberg Sudarshan Symanzik Thirring Tomonaga Tyutin Vainshtein Veltman Virasoro Ward Weinberg Weisskopf Wentzel Wess Wetterich Weyl Wick Wightman Wigner Wilczek Wilson Witten Yang Yukawa Zamolodchikov Zamolodchikov Zee Zimmermann Zinn-Justin Zuber Zumino
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Shinichiro Tomonaga^[1] (朝永 振一郎, Tomonaga Shin'ichirō, March 31, 1906 – July 8, 1979), usually cited as Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in English,^[2] 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^[3] along with Richard Feynman and Julian Schwinger.

Biography[edit]

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 laureate, 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. In 1931, 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 (Dissertation PhD from University of Tokyo) on the study of nuclear materials with his thesis on work he had done while in Leipzig.^[4]

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 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 quantum electrodynamics (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 1949,^[4] he was invited by Robert Oppenheimer to work at the Institute for Advanced StudyinPrinceton. 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 1955, he took the leadership in establishing the Institute for Nuclear Study, University of Tokyo.^[4] 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.

In recognition of three Nobel laureates' contributions, the bronze statues of Shin'ichirō Tomonaga, Leo Esaki, and Makoto Kobayashi was set up in the Central Park of Azuma 2 in Tsukuba City in 2015.^[5]

Recognition[edit]

• 1946 – Asahi Prize
• 1948 – Japan Academy Prize
• 1951 – Member of the Japan Academy
• 1952 – Order of Culture
• 1964 – Lomonosov Gold Medal
• 1965 – Nobel Prize in Physics
• 1965 – elected to the United States National Academy of Sciences^[6]
• 1966 – elected to the American Philosophical Society^[7]
• 1967 – Grand Cordon of the Order of the Rising Sun
• 1975 – elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences^[8]

Selected publications[edit]

Books[edit]

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

Articles[edit]

• Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields." Prog. Theor. Phys. 1, 27–42 (1946).
• Koba, Z., Tati, T. and Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields. II." Prog. Theor. Phys. 2, 101–116 (1947).
• Koba, Z., Tati, T. and Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields. III." Prog. Theor. Phys. 2, 198–208 (1947).
• Kanesawa, S. and Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields. IV." Prog. Theor. Phys. 3, 1–13 (1948).
• Kanesawa, S. and Tomonaga, S. "On a Relativistically Invariant Formulation of the Quantum Theory of Wave Fields. V." Prog. Theor. Phys. 3, 101–113 (1948).
• Koba, Z. and Tomonaga, S. "On Radiation Reactions in Collision Processes. I." Prog. Theor. Phys. 3, 290–303 (1948).
• Tomonaga, S. and Oppenheimer, J. R. "On Infinite Field Reactions in Quantum Field Theory." Phys. Rev. 74, 224–225 (1948).

See also[edit]

• List of Japanese Nobel laureates
• List of Nobel laureates affiliated with Kyoto University
• List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the University of Tokyo

References[edit]

Further reading[edit]

• Lundqvist, Stig, ed. (1998). Nobel Lectures in Physics (1963-1970). World Scientific. pp. 126–39. ISBN 981-02-3404-X.
• Schweber, Silvan 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[edit]

Wikiquote has quotations related to Shin'ichirō Tomonaga.

• Shin'ichirō Tomonaga on Nobelprize.org including the Nobel Lecture, May 6, 1966 Development of Quantum Electrodynamics
• Shinichiro Tomonaga
• Fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.