Three share Nobel Prize for discoveries in subatomic physics

Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for discoveries in subatomic particles, it was announced yesterday.

The Nobel committee honoured Yoichiro Nambu, a Tokyo-born American citizen, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa from Japan for separate work which dealt with so-called spontaneous broken symmetries.

Their breakthroughs came in the 1960s and 1970s. The committee said that broken symmetries concealed nature's order under an apparently jumbled surface.

Prof Nambu, a professor at the University of Chicago, was recognised for his discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. The committee said that his model unified the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature's four forces in one single theory.

He receives half of the prestigious 10 million Swedish krona (€1.04 million) prize, while Prof Kobayashi, of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation, and Prof Maskawa, of Kyoto University, share the other half. Their work predicted the existence of at least three families of subatomic quark particles in nature. Prof Kobayashi said that the news came as a shock. "It is my great honour and I can't believe this," he said.

The prize, awarded by the Nobel committee for physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, was the second of this year's crop of Nobel prizes to be announced.

- (Reuters)

This article appears in the print edition of the Irish Times