Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences Awards Nobel Prize for Studies of Broken Symmetry in Particle Physics. (October 8, 2008)

Three Japanese-born physicists were today award the Nobel Prise in Physics by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their work on "broken symmetry".

Previously unexplained broken symmetry lies behind the origin of our universe following the Big Bang  13.7 billion years ago. Had equal amounts of matter and antimatter been created, they ought to have annihilated one another. But it is estimated that one extra particle of matter for every 10 billion antimatter particles was created. It is this broken symmetry that is believed to be responsible for our material universe. How this exactly occurred remains to be elucidated.

The opening to the information file the Swedish Academy writes: Why is there something instead of nothing? Why are there so many different elementary particles? This year’s Nobel Laureates in Physics have presented theoretical insights that give us a deeper understanding
of what happens far inside the tiniest building blocks of matter.

And experimentalists have in the years following the theoretical work of Yoichiro Nambu, confirmed his "discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics", as well as that of Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa whose "discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry predicted the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"

Credit: Swedish Academy of Sciences

Yoichiro Nambu, US citizen. Born 1921 in Tokyo, Japan. D.Sc. 1952 at University of Tokyo, Japan. Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus at Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, IL, USA.
http://physics.uchicago.edu/research/areas/particle_t.html#Nambu

Makoto Kobayashi, Japanese citizen. Born 1944 in Nagoya, Japan. Ph.D. 1972 at Nagoya University, Japan. Professor Emeritus at High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Tsukuba, Japan.
www.kek.jp/intra-e/press/2007/EPSprize2_e.html

Toshihide Maskawa, Japanese citizen. Born 1940. Ph.D. 1967 at Nagoya University, Japan. Professor Emeritus at Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), Kyoto University, Japan.
www.yukawa.kyoto-u.ac.jp/english

Prize amount: SEK 10 million (A$1.98 million). Nambu receives one half and Kobayashi and Maskawa share the other half.