Okuto Morikawa Receives the 21st Particle Physics Medal: Young Scientist Award

Okuto Morikawa, Special Postdoctoral Researcher at the RIKEN Center for Interdisciplinary Theoretical and Mathematical Sciences (iTHEMS), has been awarded the 21st Particle Physics Medal: Young Scientist Award (FY2026). This award is presented to young researchers who have made outstanding contributions to the field of theoretical particle physics.

The award-winning paper established a unified framework based on the exact WKB method for analyzing resonant states, which play an important role in quantum mechanics and quantum field theory. By connecting several previously independent approaches, including Zel'dovich regularization, the complex-scaling method, and the rigged Hilbert space formulation, the work provides a unified perspective on the description of resonant states. The study further demonstrated the effectiveness of this framework through exactly solvable models and was highly recognized for offering new insights that bridge scattering theory, non-Hermitian quantum systems, and resurgence theory.

This research advances the fundamental understanding of quantum theories involving resonant states and is expected to contribute to future studies of non-perturbative structures in more general quantum systems, quantum field theories, and quantum gravity.

Congratulations, Okuto!