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Professor Hidetoshi Katori has been awarded the Breakthrough Prize

 

On 9th September 2021, it was announced that Professor Hidetoshi Katori of the Department of Applied Physics, School of Engineering has been awarded the 2022 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, one of the Breakthrough Prize academic fields.

 

Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics
The Breakthrough Prizes are international academic awards established in 2012 to honor and recognize achievements in science. There are three academic fields: Fundamental Physics, Life Sciences, and Mathematics. The prize that Professor Katori won is in the field of Fundamental Physics.

 

〈Award-winning research and activities〉
For outstanding contributions to the invention and development of the optical lattice clock, enabling precision tests of the fundamental laws of nature

 

〈Comments from the prize recipient〉
I am extremely honored to receive this recognition for my research on the optical lattice clock from its invention through to the present. This idea, which came out of curiosity-driven research that began 20 years ago, has been realized through the cooperation of my colleagues, students, and researchers across the world. Testing will precisely now begin on the true value of the optical lattice clock as a new means of observing nature. I will continue to devote myself to research and developing practical applications so that this research will become a useful measurement method for natural science and future society.

 

〈Comments from Takao Someya, Dean of the School of Engineering〉
On behalf of everyone at the School of Engineering, I would like to congratulate Professor Hidetoshi Katori on the announcement of his being awarded the Breakthrough Prize. By realizing an ultra-precise clock, named the optical lattice clock, Professor Katori has been pioneering the frontier of metrology of time and frequency, the most important research area in the field of physics. The optical lattice clock is expected to be one of the candidates for the future definition of the second. In addition, while general relativistic effects have traditionally been a purely scientific subject to be verified, with relativistic geodesy and other applications enabled by the optical lattice clocks, he is changing relativistic space-time to a new frontier in engineering. We are proud that the optical lattice clock originated at School of Engineering. Along with others at School of Engineering, I support Professor Katori’s research towards even more developments in the future.

 


Breakthrough Prize:https://breakthroughprize.org
Katori & Ushijima Laboratory :http://www.amo.t.u-tokyo.ac.jp/e_index.html
RIKEN:https://www.riken.jp/en/news_pubs/news/2021/20210910_1/index.html