Hideki Yukawa

Facts

Hideki Yukawa

Photo from the Nobel Foundation archive.

Hideki Yukawa

Born: 23 January 1907, Tokyo, Japan

Died: 8 September 1981, Kyoto, Japan

Affiliation at the time of the award: Kyoto Imperial University, Kyoto, Japan , Columbia University, New York, NY, USA

Prize motivation: "for his prediction of the existence of mesons on the basis of theoretical work on nuclear forces."

Prize share: 1/1

Work

Atomic nuclei consist of protons and neutrons held together by a strong force. Hideki Yukawa assumed that this force is borne by particles and that there is a relationship between the range of the force and the mass of the force-bearing particle. In 1934, Hideki Yukawa predicted that this particle should have a mass about 200 times that of an electron. He called this particle a "meson". Mesons' existence was verified in later experiments.

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MLA style: Hideki Yukawa – Facts. NobelPrize.org. Nobel Media AB 2018. Wed. 17 Oct 2018. <https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1949/yukawa/facts/>

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