Shinichiro Tomonaga (朝永 振一郎, Tomonaga
Shin'ichirō, March 31, 1906 – July 8, 1979),
usually cited as Sin-Itiro Tomonaga in English,
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 ==
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. 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.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
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 1955, he took
the leadership in establishing the Institute
for Nuclear Study, University of Tokyo. 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.
== Recognition ==
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
1967 – Grand Cordon of the Order of the
Rising Sun
== Selected publications ==
=== Books ===
Tomonaga, Sin-Itiro (1997). The Story of Spin.
Oka, Takeshi (trans.). University of Chicago
Press. ISBN 0-226-80794-0.
=== Articles ===
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 ==
List of Japanese Nobel laureates
List of Nobel laureates affiliated with Kyoto
University
List of Nobel laureates affiliated with the
University of Tokyo
== References ==
== Further reading ==
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 ==
Nobel Prize biography
Shinichiro Tomonaga
Fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics,
with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics
of elementary particles.
