Yoichiro Nambu (南部 陽一郎 Nambu Yōichirō?,
born January 18, 1921) is a Japanese-born
American physicist, currently a professor
at the University of Chicago.
Known
for his contributions to the field of theoretical
physics, he was awarded a one-half
share of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2008
for the discovery in 1960 of the
mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in
subatomic physics, related at first
to the strong interaction's chiral symmetry
and later to the electroweak
interaction and Higgs mechanism.
The other half share was split equally
between Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa
"for the discovery of the origin
of the broken symmetry which predicts the
existence of at least three families
of quarks in nature."
Early years
Nambu was born in Tokyo, Japan, in 1921.
After graduating from the then Fukui
Secondary High School in Fukui City, he enrolled
in the Tokyo Imperial
University and studied physics.
He received his B.S. in 1942 and D.Sc. in
1952.
In 1949 he was appointed to associate professor
at the Osaka City University and
promoted to professorship the next year at
the age of 29.
In 1952, he was invited by the Institute for
Advanced Study in Princeton, New
Jersey, United States, to study.
He moved to the University of Chicago in 1954
and was promoted to professor in 1958.
From 1974 to 1977 he was also Chairman
of the Department of Physics.
He became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1970.
Career in physics
Nambu is famous for having proposed the "color
charge" of quantum chromodynamics,
for having done early work on spontaneous
symmetry breaking in particle physics,
and for having discovered that the dual resonance
model could be explained as a
quantum mechanical theory of strings.
He is accounted as one of the founders of
string theory.
After more than 50 years as a professor, he
is now Henry Pratt Judson
Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at
The University of Chicago's
Department of Physics and Enrico Fermi Institute.
The Nambu-Goto action in string theory is
named after Nambu and Tetsuo Goto.
Also, massless bosons arising in field theories
with spontaneous symmetry
breaking are sometimes referred to as Nambu-Goldstone
bosons.
Honors and awards
Nambu has won numerous honors and awards including
the Dannie Heineman Prize (1970),
the J. Robert Oppenheimer Prize (1977), Japan's
Order of Culture (1978), the U.S.'s
National Medal of Science (1982), the Max
Planck Medal (1985), the Dirac Prize (1986),
the Sakurai Prize (1994), the Wolf Prize in
Physics (1994/1995), and the
Franklin Institute's Benjamin Franklin Medal
(2005).
He was awarded one-half of
the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery
of the mechanism of
spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics".
