Archive of historical materials
Paper draft: On the Interaction of Elementary Particles. II
OU1937-A8 (15 pages) Date: November 9, 1937
This is the manuscript of the paper, “On the Interaction of Elementary Particles II,” co-authored by Yukawa and Shoichi Sakata. Yukawa sent it by express delivery to the office of the Physical and Mathematical Society of Japan on November 9. Yukawa kept this manuscript draft to himself. It shows many sections (on both front and back sides of paper) where additional sentences and equations were handwritten by Yukawa. This was not the final manuscript of the paper. The contents of this paper were announced at the Meeting of the Physical and Mathematical Society of Japan, Osaka Branch held on September 25. Yukawa wrote sections 2 through 4 based on the manuscript (OU1937-A5) written by Shoichi Sakata. The sections 1 and 5 were most likely written by Yukawa himself. See OU1937-A9 for the final version of the manuscript.
In the manuscript, Yukawa further developed the theory of the new particles (heavy quanta, later called mesons) which he introduced in his paper, “On the Interaction of Elementary Particles I,” submitted in 1934 and published for the first time in 1935. In 1936, Yukawa projected that the new particles observed in the cosmic rays might be Yukawa’s heavy quanta and hypothesized that the heavy quantum was a scalar field. Based on this notion, he conducted the detailed analysis of the interaction of protons and neutrons. After writing the first paper, Yukawa produced nine more papers, each on a slightly different subject. In this paper, however, Yukawa dealt squarely with the meson again. As the existence of the new particles was confirmed through the observations of cosmic rays, Yukawa must have had a firm confidence in his own idea of introducing the new particles into the explanation of the nuclear force. (Written by Yutaka Hosotani)
