Nambu – A Foreseller of Modern Physics

Coming into the 21st century, developments in three major areas of elementary particle physics — the electroweak theory with the Higgs mechanism, quantum chromodynamics, and string theory began to yield more and more concrete and successful results.

Seeds of all these developments in contemporary particle physics were sowed by Nambu in prophetic lectures and papers from the 1960s–70s.

The discovery of the Higgs-like scalar particle at the Large Hadron Collider in July 2011 was the climax for the idea of spontaneous symmetry breaking that Nambu had laid down at the beginning of the 1960s.

In this book, we collect what we consider to be the most prophetic of Nambu's papers for the benefit of current and future generations of particle physicists of the world and made them easily accessible for all. It also contains articles never published before in a book form. This text is not only of historical value but also provides a window to the mind of a man many refer to as “Nambu the seer.”

A must-have book for future researchers of elementary particle theory and for those interested in the history of modern physics.

Contents:
• Force Potentials in Quantum Field Theory
• On the Nature of V-Particles I and II (with K Nishijima and Y Yamaguchi)
• Possible Existence of a Heavy Neutral Meson
• Quasi-Particles and Gauge Invariance in the Theory of Superconductivity
• Axial Vector Current Conservation in Weak Interactions
• Dynamical Model of Elementary Particles Based on an Analogy with Superconductivity I (with G Jona-Lasinio)
• Dynamical Model of Elementary Particles Based on an Analogy with Superconductivity II (with G Jona-Lasinio)
• Chirality Conservation with Soft Pion Production (with D Lurié)
• Three-Triplet Model with Double SU(3) Symmetry (with M-Y Han)
• A Systematics of Hadrons in Subnuclear Physics
• S-Matrix in Semiclassical Approximation
• Quark Model and the Factorization of the Veneziano Amplitude
• Duality and Hadrodynamics
• Generalized Hamiltonian Dynamics
• Fermion–Boson Relations in BCS-Type Theories
• Three Stages, Three Modes, and Beyond
• Some Anomalies Related to Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking
• 2008 Nobel Lecture