ARTHUR Y. SAKAKURA

Associate Professor. BS, MS Massachusetts Institute of Technology; PhD University of Colorado.

Research Interests

As a seventh grader in prewar San Francisco, I was fortunate to experience "satori"; that the oxidation of hydrogen yields plain ordinary water, that the stars are suns, and that the universe is composed of a vast (but countable!) number of stars separated by vast (but measurable!) expanses of space and time. Since then, on the often frustrating journey through academic apprenticeship, my path was illuminated by the creations of Einstein and Dirac and, later, by the beautiful structure of quantum field theory and statistical mechanics; their siren song still holds sway over me.

Under ordinary conditions, there are only two types of "elementary" particles; fermions and bosons. The state representing any number of these can be readily constructed in terms of what are rather grandiloquently called creation and annihilation operators, which obey simple commutation and anticommutation relationships. Most particles of interest are composites of these elementary particles and exhibit boson or fermion properties depending upon the number of elementary fermions. However, their commutation or anticommutation properties are complex.

In particular, the Cooper pairs of superconductivity are nominal bosons. No one has been able to construct states with arbitrary numbers of composite and elementary particles such that they are mutually orthogonal and complete. Until this is accomplished, statistical mechanics and kinetic theory of systems with composite particles remain quasiphenomenological.

We have succeeded in constructing complete orthonormal states for a single-state boson (such as a Cooper pair), but there are inconsistencies which need to be resolved. The extension to infinite numbers of momentum states (such as He4) is under study, as is the role of projection operators in quantum mechanics, in the field of mathematical physics.

In teaching I try to emulate my past instructors, who differed widely in temperament and style but were all intellectually demanding and expected, as a matter of course, that students would rise above themselves. Although officially retiring in 1995, I will continue to teach on a part-time basis for another two years.

 Last Modified: 9/13/99
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