Toshihide Maskawa


Toshihide Maskawa is a :Category:Japanese physicists|Japanese theoretical physicist known for his work on CP-violation who was awarded one quarter of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."

Early life and education

After World War II ended, the Maskawa family operated as a sugar wholesaler. A native of Aichi Prefecture, Toshihide Maskawa graduated from Nagoya University in 1962 and received a Ph.D. degree in particle physics from the same university in 1967. His doctoral advisor was the physicist Shoichi Sakata.
From early life Maskawa liked trivia, also studied mathematics, chemistry, linguistics and various books. In high school, he loved novels, especially detective and mystery stories and novels by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

Career

At Kyoto University in the early 1970s, he collaborated with Makoto Kobayashi on explaining broken symmetry within the Standard Model of particle physics. Maskawa and Kobayashi's theory required that there be at least three generations of quarks, a prediction that was confirmed experimentally four years later by the discovery of the bottom quark.
Maskawa and Kobayashi's 1973 article, "CP Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction", is the fourth most cited high energy physics paper of all time as of 2010. The Cabibbo–Kobayashi–Maskawa matrix, which defines the mixing parameters between quarks was the result of this work. Kobayashi and Maskawa were jointly awarded half of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for this work, with the other half going to Yoichiro Nambu.
Maskawa was director of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics from 1997 to 2003. He is now special professor and director general of Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute for the Origin of Particles and the Universe at Nagoya University, director of Maskawa Institute for Science and Culture at Kyoto Sangyo University and professor emeritus at Kyoto University.

Nobel Lecture

On 8 December 2008, after Maskawa told the audience "Sorry, I cannot speak English", he delivered his Nobel lecture on “What Did CP Violation Tell Us?” in Japanese language, at Stockholm University. The audience followed the subtitles on the screen behind him.

Recognition

In 2013, Maskawa and chemistry Nobel laureate Hideki Shirakawa issued a statement against the Japanese State Secrecy Law." The following is Maskawa's main political proposition: