Laureates

Kyoto University

2015 New Horizons in Physics Prize

For fundamental ideas about entropy in quantum field theory and quantum gravity.

Comments

I have luckily got quite a lot of benefit from my teachers, collaborators and colleagues. During my PhD course at the University of Tokyo, I learned a lot of ideas in theoretical physics from my advisor Tohru Eguchi, who especially taught me how string theory is beautiful. When I moved to Harvard as a post-doctoral fellow, Andy Strominger and Shiraz Minwalla mentored me warmly and constantly stimulated me with their deep insights. This opened up my new research directions. Later I became a post-doc at KITP in UCSB and I would like to thank Gary Horowitz and Joe Polchinski very much for kindly mentoring me. In KITP, I was fortunate to meet Shinsei Ryu, and we started exploring a new direction of research by importing the idea of quantum entanglement. This is largely indebted to the wonderful environment of KITP, where theoretical physicists working on different subjects can nicely interact. I would also like to thank the members of the physics department at Kyoto University, Kavli IPMU at the University of Tokyo and Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University for encouragement and stimulation. Finally I would like to send my gratitude to my wife Rieko, my son Ryoichi, and my parents Itaru and Kazuko.