Japanese Physicists Share Nobel Award

Stockholm, Sweden (AHN) - Three Japanese shared the Nobel award for Physics for their discoveries in the field of subatomic physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced Tuesday.

Half of the prize went to the pair of Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan, who discovered the origin of broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature. The other half went to Japan-born Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago. Nambu, 87, discovered a mechanism called spontaneous broke symmetry in subatomic physics.

The academy cited Nambu's theories which "permeates the standard model of elementary particle physics. The model unifies the smallest building blocks of all matters and three of nature's four forces in one single theory."

Nambu migrated to the U.S. in 1952, where he has worked for 40 years as a professor at the University of Chicago.

The 64-year old Kobayashi is connected with the High Energy Accelerator Organization in Tsukuba, while Maskawa, 68, works at the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics at Kyoto University.

The academy stressed that the broken symmetries studied by Nambu were different from those described by Kobayashi and Maskawa. "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," the academy said.

The prize money for the Nobel laureate in Physics is $1.4 million, to be shared by the three. The award ceremonies will be held in Stockholm on Dec. 10.