Mr. Shinji Yamada, First Secretary, Embassy of Japan and Professor Peter A. Hogan, UCD School of Physics.
Professor Peter A. Hogan, UCD School of Physics, has become the first Irish scientist to be awarded a prestigious Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Fellowship by Japan’s leading funding agency. During the collaboration, Prof Hogan will work with Prof Toshifumi Futamase and his colleagues Dr Yousuke Itoh and Takashi Fukumoto in Tohoku University. As one of the three oldest universities in Japan, Tohoku University graduates include 1983 graduate, Koichi Tanaka, who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Professor Hogan works in the field of General Relativity (Einstein’s theory of Gravity) and his Japanese collaboration will focus on developing a general relativistic theory of celestial mechanics exploiting the geometry of space-time. He has been collaborating with Prof Futamase since 1991, and in 1992 was the first Irish scientist to be awarded a Canon Foundation Visiting Fellowship to work in Japan. His published work with Prof Futamase involves modelling high frequency gravitational waves from isolated gravitating systems using General Relativity.
While working in Japan Prof Hogan also initiated his study of impulsive gravitational waves (bursts of radiation from violent astrophysical events) in a single-author paper published in Physical Review Letters. This led to an extraordinarily fruitful collaboration over the past fourteen years with Professor Claude Barrabès, CNRS Group, Université de Tours. A monograph, “Singular Null Hypersurfaces in General Relativity” (World Scientific 2004) by Barrabès and Hogan has been described by Professor G.W. Gibbons FRS, University of Cambridge, writing in Contemporary Physics, as “a major contribution to the subject and likely to become a classic reference”.
Professor Hogan has collaborated with five of the leading figures in the history of General Relativity: Professors J.L. Synge (Dublin), I. Robinson (Texas), A. Trautman (Warsaw), G.F.R. Ellis (Cape Town) and W. Israel (Victoria). He has published work in Classical Electrodynamics and Yang-Mills Gauge Theory from the Fibre Bundle point of view as well as in General Relativity (Equations of Motion, Gravitational Radiation, Exact Solutions of Einstein’s Equations and Cosmology).
