Two Japanese, American win 2008 physics Nobel

By Niklas Pollard

STOCKHOLM (Reuters) - Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American shared the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics for helping to explain the behavior of subatomic particles, work that has helped shape modern physics theory, the prize committee said on Tuesday.

The Nobel committee lauded Yoichiro Nambu, now of the University of Chicago, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for work that helped show why the universe is made up mostly of matter and not anti-matter via changes known as broken symmetries.

Nambu's analogy likens the changes to when one dinner guest uses the wrong bread plate, forcing all the other guests at a round table to change as well.

"The work he has done has had implications from the study of the early universe all the way to the behavior of magnetic materials," University of Chicago Provost Thomas Rosenbaum told a news conference.

The three men's work, done in the 1950s through the 1970s, predicted the behavior of the tiny particles known as quarks and underlies the Standard Model, which unites three of the four fundamental forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, weak nuclear force and electromagnetic force.

Nambu also influenced the development of quantum chromodynamics, which describes some interactions between protons and neutrons, which make up atoms, and the quarks that make up the protons and neutrons.

SHARED PRIZE

He shared half of the 10 million Swedish crown ($1.4 million) prize with Kobayashi of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Maskawa of Kyoto University.  Continued...