Okubo receives prestigious prize
Okubo |
usumu Okubo '58 (PhD), professor of physics, has been selected to receive the most prestigious honor in his field: the 2005 American Physical Society's J. J. Sakurai Prize in Theoretical Particle Physics. The annual award recognizes and encourages outstanding achievement in particle theory, usually for contributions made at an early stage of the recipient's research career.
"Okubo is one of the most important theoretical particle physicists of his generation," says Arie Bodek, chair of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. "This prize is long overdue. We are proud of Okubo both as a Rochester alumnus and as the third physics and astronomy faculty member to be honored by the American Physical Society in the past five years."
Okubo, who will receive the prize in April at the APS meeting in Tampa, was honored for groundbreaking investigations into the patterns and decay rates of subatomic particles made of quarks. APS also selected Okubo for his demonstration that CP violations, a phenomenon where a particle's "mirror image" does not behave exactly as a mirror image should, permit partial decay rate differences in the two "mirrored" particles. His research provided pivotal aspects of the quark model of matter, upon which the standard model of physics is built today.
Okubo received his bachelor's degree in physics from the University of Tokyo, Japan in 1952, and his doctorate in physics from Rochester in 1958. After a year of postdoctoral research, he left for the University of Napoli in Italy and CERN in Switzerland to extend his work in particle physics. He returned to the University in 1962 as a senior research associate and was promoted to full professor in 1964.
He is the author of the book Introduction to Octonian and Other Non-associative Algebras in Physics. He was awarded a Nishina Prize in 1976 from the Nishina Foundation in Japan for his contributions to particle physics. He was a recipient of Guggenheim and Ford Foundation fellowships, and he is a fellow of the American Physical Society.
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