益川 敏英 Toshihide Maskawa |
|
---|---|
Born |
Nagoya, Japan |
February 7, 1940
Residence | Japan |
Nationality | Japan |
Fields | High energy physics (theory) |
Institutions |
Nagoya University Kyoto University Kyoto Sangyo University |
Alma mater | Nagoya University |
Doctoral advisor | Shoichi Sakata |
Known for | Work on CP violation CKM matrix |
Notable awards |
Sakurai Prize (1985) Japan Academy Prize (1985) Asahi Prize (1994) Nobel Prize in Physics (2008) |
Toshihide Maskawa (or Masukawa) (益川 敏英 Masukawa Toshihide?, born February 7, 1940 in Nagoya, Japan) is a 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."
A native of Aichi Prefecture, Maskawa graduated from Nagoya University in 1962 and received a Ph.D in particle physics from the same university in 1967. At Kyoto University in the early 1970s, he collaborated with Makoto Kobayashi on explaining broken symmetry (the CP violation) 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.