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Physics World

Quantum physicist joins Japan's elite

Edwin Cartlidge

Published Feb 1, 2008• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

A physicist who carries out research into the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics has been elected as a member of the prestigious Japan Academy in Tokyo. Akira Tonomura, who has worked at Hitachi for over 40 years, becomes one of just five physicists elected to the august body, two of whom, Leo Esaki and Masatoshi Koshiba, are Nobel-prize winners. Tonomura, 65, was selected for his development of electron holography, which allowed him to significantly extend the capabilities of electron microscopy and also to prove the reality of the controversial Aharonov–Bohm effect.

DOI
10.1088/2058-7058/21/02/21

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A physicist who carries out research into the fundamental aspects of quantum mechanics has been elected as a member of the prestigious Japan Academy in Tokyo. Akira Tonomura, who has worked at Hitachi for over 40 years, becomes one of just five physicists elected to the august body, two of whom, Leo Esaki and Masatoshi Koshiba, are Nobel-prize winners. Tonomura, 65, was selected for his development of electron holography, which allowed him to significantly extend the capabilities of electron microscopy and also to prove the reality of the controversial Aharonov–Bohm effect.
On May 9 and May 10, 2012. Tonomura FIRST International Symposium on “Electron Microscopy and Gauge Fields” was held in downtown Tokyo hosted by Japan Science and Technology Agency together with Hitachi, Ltd., RIKEN, Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology, OIST, The Asahi Shimbun, Nikkei Inc. and Nikkei Science Inc. Here FIRST stands for “Funding program for world-leading innovative research and development on science and technology”. In 2010 as principal investigator Dr. Akira Tonomura was awarded this Japanese-government-funded project aiming at developing a 1.2 MV “holography electron microscope” which is capable of observing quantum phenomena in the microscopic world. The symposium was also intended to celebrate his 70th birthday, but on May 2, just a week before the opening of the symposium, Tonomura passed away during the course of a medical treatment on pancreatic cancer. Consequently, what had been planned to be a grand meeting with many of his scientific friends from all over the world, then turned as a memorial conference.
The Aharonov–Bohm effect is a fundamental issue in physics. It describes the physically important electromagnetic quantities in quantum mechanics. Its experimental verification constitutes a test of the theory of quantum mechanics itself. The remarkable experiments of Tonomura et al. [“Observation of Aharonov-Bohm effect by electron holography,” Phys. Rev. Lett 48, 1443 (1982) and “Evidence for Aharonov-Bohm effect with magnetic field completely shielded from electron wave,” Phys. Rev. Lett 56, 792 (1986)] are widely considered as the only experimental evidence of the physical existence of the Aharonov–Bohm effect. Here we give the first rigorous proof that the classical ansatz of Aharonov and Bohm of 1959 [“Significance of electromagnetic potentials in the quantum theory,” Phys. Rev. 115, 485 (1959)], that was tested by Tonomura et al., is a good approximation to the exact solution to the Schrödinger equation. This also proves that the electron, that is, represented by the exact solution, is not accelerated, in agreement with the recent experiment of Caprez et al. in 2007 [“Macroscopic test of the Aharonov–Bohm effect,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 99, 210401 (2007)], that shows that the results of the Tonomura et al. experiments can not be explained by the action of a force. Under the assumption that the incoming free electron is a Gaussian wave packet, we estimate the exact solution to the Schrödinger equation for all times. We provide a rigorous, quantitative error bound for the difference in norm between the exact solution and the Aharonov–Bohm Ansatz. Our bound is uniform in time. We also prove that on the Gaussian asymptotic state the scattering operator is given by a constant phase shift, up to a quantitative error bound that we provide. Our results show that for intermediate size electron wave packets, smaller than the ones used in the Tonomura et al. experiments, quantum mechanics predicts the results observed by Tonomura et al. with an error bound smaller than 10−99. It would be quite interesting to perform experiments with electron wave packets of intermediate size. Furthermore, we provide a physical interpretation of our error bound.
On October 9, 2012, the Royal Swedish Academy of Science announced the winners of the Nobel Prize in Physics: Serge Haroche and David J. Wineland. They were awarded this prestigious prize for their innovative techniques that achieved the first nondestructive observations of quantum events. Though Haroche and Wineland worked individually to accomplish this spectacular feat, their novel methods have similarities that ultimately led to complementary results. With lessons learned from these experiments, time is measured more precisely and the future for quantum computing looks brighter.
In 1933 the Nobel prizes seemed of little importance compared with the global economic depression and the rise to power of the Nazis, but many physicists still kept a watchful eye on Stockholm. Their bewilderment and chagrin over the most recent decisions by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences had fuelled anticipation. No prize had been awarded in physics since 1930, yet recent theoretical and experimental achievements had led to a revolutionary new quantum-mechanical depiction of the atom. Would the Academy finally acknowledge these accomplishments?