2008 Nobel Prize in Physics

The 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded to Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa. The prize was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm on 7 October 2008.

The citation

Half of the prize goes to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics". Half of the prize goes jointly to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".

The laureates

Yoichiro Nambu was born in 1921 in Tokyo, Japan, and is affiliated with Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago. Makoto Kobayashi was born in 1944 in Nagoya, Japan, and is affiliated with High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba. Toshihide Maskawa was born in 1940 in Nagoya, Japan, and is affiliated with Kyoto Sangyo University, Kyoto and Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Kyoto.

Why it matters

Broken symmetry helps explain why the universe contains matter rather than nothing. Kobayashi and Maskawa's work predicted a third family of quarks, which was later found in experiments.

The prize

The prize is worth 10 million Swedish kronor, divided between the laureates. It will be presented at a ceremony in Stockholm on 10 December, the anniversary of the death of Alfred Nobel, the Swedish inventor of dynamite whose will founded the prizes in 1895.