Yukawa, Hideki


Yukawa, Hideki

(hē`dĕkē yo͞okä`wä), 1907–81, Japanese physicist, grad. Kyoto Univ., 1929, Ph.D. Osaka Univ., 1938. He was professor of physics at Kyoto Univ. from 1939 to 1970. He received the 1949 Nobel Prize in Physics for predicting (1935) the existence of the mesonmeson
[Gr.,=middle (i.e., middleweight)], class of elementary particles whose masses are generally between those of the lepton class of lighter particles and those of the baryon class of heavier particles. From a technical point of view mesons are strongly interacting bosons; i.
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. After further developing the meson theory of nuclear forces, he began (1947) work on his "nonlocal field" theory for elementary particles. In 1948 he came to the United States, where he spent a year at the Institute for Advanced Study and was (1949–53) visiting professor at Columbia.