Susumu Okubo
Susumu Okubo (大久保 進 Ōkubo Susumu, born 1930) is a Japanese theoretical physicist at the University of Rochester.
Ōkubo began study at the University of Tokyo in 1949 and received his bachelor's degree there in 1952. He became a graduate student at the University of Rochester in 1954, where he earned his PhD in 1958 with Robert Marshak as thesis advisor. Afterwards, he was a postdoc in 1959/60 at the University of Naples, in 1960/61 at CERN, after that for a short time in Japan because he had a problem obtaining a US visa, and then in 1962 again at the University of Rochester, where he became a professor in 1964 and retired in 1996 as an emeritus professor. Ōkubo works primarily on elementary particle physics. He is famous for the Gell-Mann-Okubo mass formula for mesons and baryons in the quark model; this formula correctly predicts the relations of masses of the members of SU(3) multiplets in terms of hypercharge and isotopic spin.[1]
In 2005 he received the Sakurai Prize from the American Physical Society; "For groundbreaking investigations into the pattern of hadronic masses and decay rates, which provided essential clues into the development of the quark model, and for demonstrating that CP violation permits partial decay rate asymmetries".[2]
In 1976 the Nishina Memorial Prize in Japan and in 2006 the Wigner Medal. In 1966 he was a Guggenheim Fellow and in 1969 a Ford Fellow. He is a member of the American Physical Society and the American Mathematical Society.
Works
- Introduction to Octonion and other associative algebras in physics. Cambridge University Press, 2005
References
- ↑ Ōkubo: Note on unitary symmetry in strong interactions. in: Progress in theoretical physics Vol. 27, 1962, p. 949, Vol. 28, 1962, p. 24
- ↑ Susumu Okubo - 2005 J. J. Sakurai Prize Winner
External links
- Biography from the University of Rochester
- Okubo on the discovery of the mass formula (pdf file, 92 kB)
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