Susumu Okubo

Who is Susumu Okubo?

Susumu Okubo is a Japanese theoretical physicist at the University of Rochester.

Ōkubo began study at the University of Tokyo in 1949 and received his bachelor's degree there in 1952. He became a graduate student at the University of Rochester in 1954, where he earned his PhD in 1958 with Robert Marshak as thesis advisor. Afterwards, he was a postdoc in 1959/60 at the University of Naples, in 1960/61 at CERN, after that for a short time in Japan because he had a problem obtaining a US visa, and then in 1962 again at the University of Rochester, where he became a professor in 1964 and retired in 1996 as an emeritus professor. Ōkubo works primarily on elementary particle physics. He is famous for the Gell-Mann-Okubo mass formula for mesons and baryons in the quark model; this formula correctly predicts the relations of masses of the members of SU multiplets in terms of hypercharge and isotopic spin.