Yasunori Nomura (born 1974) is a

theoretical physicist Theoretical physics is a branch of physics that employs mathematical models and abstractions of physical objects and systems to rationalize, explain, and predict natural phenomena. This is in contrast to experimental physics, which uses experi ...

working on particle physics, quantum gravity, and cosmology. He is a professor of physics at

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...

, a senior faculty scientist at

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL, Berkeley Lab) is a Federally funded research and development centers, federally funded research and development center in the Berkeley Hills, hills of Berkeley, California, United States. Established i ...

, a senior research scientist at

Riken is a national scientific research institute in Japan. Founded in 1917, it now has about 3,000 scientists on seven campuses across Japan, including the main site at Wakō, Saitama, Wakō, Saitama Prefecture, on the outskirts of Tokyo. Riken is a ...

, and an affiliate member at

Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe The Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (IPMU) is an international research institute for physics and mathematics situated in Kashiwa, Japan, near Tokyo. Its full name is ''"Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathemat ...

. Since 2015, he has been the director of the Berkeley Center for Theoretical Physics.

Career

Nomura received his

Ph.D. A Doctor of Philosophy (PhD, DPhil; or ) is a terminal degree that usually denotes the highest level of academic achievement in a given discipline and is awarded following a course of graduate study and original research. The name of the deg ...

from

University of Tokyo The University of Tokyo (, abbreviated as in Japanese and UTokyo in English) is a public research university in Bunkyō, Tokyo, Japan. Founded in 1877 as the nation's first modern university by the merger of several pre-westernisation era ins ...

(supervisor

Tsutomu Yanagida Tsutomu Yanagida is a Japanese physicist who first proposed the seesaw mechanism in 1979 and developed the model of leptogenesis. The name of the seesaw mechanism was given by him in a Tokyo conference in 1981. In 1994, he predicted, together wit ...

) in 2000 and became a Miller Research Fellow at University of California, Berkeley. In 2002-03 he was an associate scientist at

Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located in Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Fermilab's Main Injector, two miles (3.3 k ...

. In July 2003 he joined the Department of Physics at University of California, Berkeley. In 2017, Nomura was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for pioneering contributions to a variety of areas of particle theory, including gauge unification in extra dimensions, electroweak symmetry breaking, supersymmetric models, dark matter, the multiverse, foundations of quantum mechanics, and black holes."

Work

Nomura works on particle physics, quantum gravity, and cosmology. He developed theories of grand unification in higher dimensional spacetime and constructed the so-called holographic Higgs model, the first realistic model in which a composite

Higgs particle The Higgs boson, sometimes called the Higgs particle, is an elementary particle in the Standard Model of particle physics produced by the quantum excitation of the Higgs field, one of the fields in particle physics theory. In the Stan ...

arises as a

pseudo-Nambu–Goldstone boson In particle physics, chiral symmetry breaking generally refers to the dynamical spontaneous breaking of a chiral symmetry associated with massless fermions. This is usually associated with a gauge theory such as quantum chromodynamics, the quantu ...

. He also proposed that the eternally inflating

multiverse The multiverse is the hypothetical set of all universes. Together, these universes are presumed to comprise everything that exists: the entirety of space, time, matter, energy, information, and the physical laws and constants that describ ...

is the same thing as quantum many worlds.

References

External links

Yasunori Nomura's home page at University of California, Berkeley

List of publications on INSPIRE
Japanese string theorists Living people 1974 births Fellows of the American Physical Society Scientists from Kanagawa Prefecture {{Japan-scientist-stub