November 17, 2015
Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe (Kavli IPMU)
Kavli IPMU researcher Yuji Tachikawa was honored at the 2016 Breakthrough Prize ceremony, held at NASA’s Ames Research Center on November 9.
Tachikawa was awarded the 2016 Fundamental Physics New Horizons Prize for his penetrating and incisive studies of supersymmetric quantum field theories.
The Breakthrough Prizes in Physics were set up in 2012 by Russian entrepreneur Yuri Milner. They consist of three prizes: the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Special Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, and the New Horizons Prize. Tachikawa’s prize recognizes junior researchers who have made significant contributions to their field.
“I'd like to thank all the institutes and universities that have provided me with the best research environments; I am grateful and feel very fortunate to have been able to work with amazing mentors and colleagues; and I am especially thankful to my family for their continued support. I would like to consider this Prize as a stepping stone and promise to continue to do good research,” says Tachikawa.
The 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics was awarded to scientists in five experiments around the world for their studies in neutrino oscillations. Seven scientists representing the experiments, including Kavli IPMU’s Yoichiro Suzuki and Takaaki Kajita, received the award at the same ceremony of behalf of all the researchers.
In 2010, Tachikawa collaborated with Luis Fernando Alday and Davide Gaiotto and developed the Alday-Gaiotto-Tachikawa correspondence: the trio had found that the partition functions of carefully chosen four-dimentional and two-dimensional quantum field theories are equal to one another. This discovery was a big step in the understanding of quantum field theory in various dimensions.
To date, Tachikawa has also received the 2014 Nishinomiya-Yukawa Memorial Prize, and he was the first Japanese national to receive the Hermann Weyl Prize in 2014.
Yuji Tachikawa Timeline
2006 Ph.D. (majoring in Physics), School of Science, University of Tokyo
2006 Research Scientist, The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS)
2010 Project Assistant Professor, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe, University of Tokyo
2012 Associate Professor, School of Science, University of Tokyo
Scientist, Kavli Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe
Related Links
Breakthrough Prize Foundation website
2016 New Horizons in Physics Prize website
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