Nishijima Kazuhiko

Born Oct. 4, 1926. Japanese theoretical physicist.

Nishijima graduated from the University of Tokyo (1948) and worked at the University of Osaka (1950–59). He worked at the Max Planck Institute for Physics in Göttingen (1956–57) and the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton (1957–58). He was a professor at the University of Illinois in the USA from 1959 to 1967. Since 1967 he has been a university professor in Tokyo.

Nishijima’s main work has been on the theory of weak interactions. In 1953, independently of and simultaneously with M. Gell-Mann, he introduced the concept of strangeness to the theory of elementary particles and discovered the law of conservation of the strangeness quantum number in strong and electromagnetic interactions. In his works on the theory of the four-component neutrino (1957), Nishijima predicted the existence of two types of neutrino. He studied bound states in quantum field theory.