Maskawa Toshihide

Maskawa Toshihide (born February 7, 1940, Nagoya, Japan—died July 23, 2021, Kyōto) was a Japanese physicist who was a corecipient, with Yoichiro Nambu and Kobayashi Makoto, of the 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics. Maskawa and Kobayashi shared half the prize for their discovery of the origin of broken symmetry, which created at least six quarks moments after the big bang.

Maskawa received a Ph.D. in 1967 from Nagoya University in Japan. In 1972 Kobayashi and Maskawa proposed that CP violation (the violation of the combined conservation laws associated with charge conjugation [C] and parity [P] by the weak force) is an inherent property of the standard model of subatomic particles if there exist at least two additional quarks beyond the four “flavours” (up, down, charm, and strange) known at that time. These two new quark flavours were experimentally confirmed in 1977 (bottom quark) and 1995 (top quark).

Maskawa taught at the University of Tokyo’s Institute of Nuclear Study and Kyōto Sangyō University. From 1997 to 2003 he was director of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University, from which he retired as professor emeritus. In 1985 Maskawa and Kobayashi were the first recipients of the J.J. Sakurai Prize.