Three Japanese physicists take the Nobel Prize

The Institute of Physics

7 October 2008

Nobel Prize 2008

Tiger Tiger. Burning bright,
In the forests of the night;
What immortal hand or eye.
Could frame thy fearful symmetry? – William Blake

The Institute of Physics congratulates the three physicists who have received this year’s Nobel Prize for Physics.

Yoichiro Nambu from the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago receives half the prize ‘for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics’. Makoto Kobayashi from the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) Tsukuba and Toshihide Maskawa from Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP), KyotoUniversity share the other half for ‘the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.’

Our appreciation of beauty in Nature is deeply connected to symmetry. Theoretical Physicists are also attracted to symmetry in Nature as embodied in the mathematical symmetry in their equations. Symmetry for physicists is connected to conserved quantities in Nature, for example Charge and Energy. So the search for symmetries illuminates the path to new physical laws and new particles. Conversely, the breaking of a symmetry has profound implications for physics.

Nambu was the first physicist to introduce the concept spontaneous broken symmetry violation to the mathematical framework of particle physics known as quantum field theory – a concept that had previously found fertile application in explaining the phenomenon of Superconductivity. This has proven to be a crucial tool in the development of the Standard Model. Such arguments have led to the prediction of the Higgs particle, evidence for which the Large Hadron Collider is now seeking.

Kobayashi and Maskawa’s work in interpreting the behaviour of a class of particles called kaons which violated a certain kind of symmetry extended the Standard Model and led to the prediction of further families of fundamental particles which have since been confirmed in particle physics experiments.

Nambu, Kobayashi and Maskawa follow in a fine tradition of Japanese particle physicists – Yukawa (Nobel prize in 1949) and Tomonaga (Nobel prize in 1965) for which Japan should be justly proud.

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