The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) announced on October 7 that the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics was to be awarded 3 Japanese, Prof. YOICHIRO NAMBU of Chicago University, Prof. Makoto Kobayashi of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK) and Prof. Toshihide Maskawa of Kyoto Sangyo University. This prize acknowledges the pioneering role their finding play in theories on elementary particles.
Nambu received his award "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics"
Maskawa and Kobayashi were jointly acknowledged "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature"
