Physicists win Nobel for work on asymmetry
Two Japanese scientists and a Japanese-born American have won the Nobel physics prize for discovering the fundamental asymmetry of the universe.
Their theoretical work during the 1960s and 1970s laid the foundations for the so-called Standard Model, which unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and three of nature’s four forces in a single framework.
Yoichiro Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, receives half of the SKr10m ($1.4m) prize. Prof Nambu was born and educated in Tokyo, and moved to the US in 1952. His mathematical work showed the basis of “spontaneous broken symmetry” as early as 1960. Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation in Tsukuba, Japan, and Toshihide Maskawa of the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics, Kyoto University, share the other half of the prize.
They took Prof Nambu’s research forward to explain how asymmetry explained the existence of quarks. Quarks are the indivisible building blocks of neutrons and protons, which in turn make up the familiar atoms and molecules of our world.
Broken symmetry lies behind the origin of the cosmos in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago. If equal amounts of matter and antimatter had been created, they would have annihilated each other - leaving nothing behind.
But this did not happen. There was a tiny deviation, with one extra particle of matter created for every 10 billion antimatter particles. This broken symmetry enabled the universe to survive and grow.
Although the three latest laureates provided partial answers, more theoretical and experimental work is required to solve fully the mystery of how symmetry is broken in nature.
“Perhaps the new LHC particle accelerator at Cern in Geneva will unravel some of the mysteries that continue to puzzle us,” said the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in its Nobel citation.
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