On a possible interpretation of the penetrating component of the cosmic ray. Offprint from: Proceedings of the Physico-Mathematical Society of Japan, 3rd Ser., Vol. 19, No. 7, July 1937. YUKAWA'S MESON?

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First edition, very rare offprint, of Yukawa's suggestion that the meson, whose existence he predicted in 1935 to mediate the 'strong interaction' between nucleons, was the same as a particle recently discovered in cosmic rays. "The turning point in the development of the theory of nuclear force, or of general interactions, was marked by Yukawa's work, 'On the interaction of elementary particles' (1935)' or Yukawa's meson theory for short' . . . His meson theory is the basis of the whole modern theory of fundamental interactions . . . Since Yukawa's work, the dominant idea has been that each fundamental interaction in nature should be characterized by a mediating boson field" (Cao, Conceptual Developments of 20th Century Field Theories, pp. 183-4). "In the Physical Review of 15 August 1936, Carl Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer published photographs of particle tracks obtained in a cloud chamber operated in the field of a strong magnet atop Pike's Peak in Colorado. In some cases they could not positively identify the tracks as belonging to either electrons or protons. Yukawa wrote a letter to Nature pointing out that it was not altogether impossible that the ambiguous particles were his heavy quanta. That letter was rejected by the editor, but Yukawa succeeded in publishing a short note having the same contents in the Proceedings of the Physico-Mathematical Society of Japan in July 1937 [the offered paper]. By then, several experimental groups had reported the observation of particles of both signs of electric charge and of mass between that of the electron and the proton, at roughly one-tenth of the proton mass. The observation of the new cosmic-ray particles, which came to be called mesotrons, aroused interest in Yukawa's theory . . . The mesotron turned out to be the second-generation heavy electron that we now call the muon, and the true meson of Yukawa, the pion, was found in cosmic rays only in 1947" (Brown, 'Hideki Yukawa and the meson theory,' Physics Today, December 1986, pp. 55-62). Large 8vo, pp. 712-713. Self wrappers, as issued (a few tiny marginal tears, crease to upper outer corner). N° de ref. del artículo ABE-1678986946481

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