Scientists Yoichiro Nambu from the US and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa from Japan have won the Nobel Prize in Physics 2008.
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences made the announcement Tuesday in Stockholm.
"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2008 with one half to Yoichiro Nambu from University of Chicago for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics and the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa from Japan for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature," said Professor Gunnar Öquist, Permanent Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences at the press conference.
According to RSAS, Yoichiro Nambu formulated his mathematical description of spontaneous broken symmetry in elementary particle physics as early as 1960. It has proved to be extremely useful and Nambu's theories permeate the Standard Model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature's four forces in one single theory.
Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa described the broken symmetries. These spontaneous occurrences seem to have existed in nature since the very beginning of the universe and came as a complete surprise when they first appeared in particle experiments in 1964.
But it is only in recent years that scientists have come to fully confirm the explanations that Kobayshi and Maskawa made in 1972. It is for this work that they are now awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics.
They explained broken symmetry within the framework of the Standard Model, but required that the Model be extended to three families of quarks.
In 2001, the two particle detectors BaBar at Stanford, USA and Belle at Tsukuba, Japan, both detected broken symmetries independently of each other. The results were exactly as Kobayashi and Maskawa had predicted in 1972.
Yoichiro Nambu was born in 1921 in Tokyo and graduated at University of Tokyo in 1952, but he moved to the US and became professor at University of Chicago later.
Makoto Kobayashi was born in 1944 in Nagoya Japan and graduated from Nagoya University and Professor Emeritus at High Energy Accelerator Research Organization Tsukuba Japan.
Toshihide Maskawa was born in 1940 and got PhD in 1967 at Nagoya University. He is Professor Emeritus at Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics Kyoto University, Japan.
By Xuefei Chen, People's Daily Online correspondent in Stockholm.
|
Comment
Tell A Friend
Print Format
Save Article