Stockholm, October 7
Two Japanese scientists and a Tokyo-born American shared the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics for discoveries in sub-atomic particles, the prize committee said today.

The Nobel committee lauded Yoichiro Nambu, a Tokyo-born American citizen, and Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan for separate work that helped explain why the universe is made up mostly of matter and not anti-matter via processes known as ‘broken symmetries’.

They helped figure out the existence and behaviour of the very tiniest particles known as quarks.

Nambu, a professor at the University of Chicago, was recognised for his discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry. It helps underlie the standard model of physics, which unites three of the four fundamental forces of nature: strong, weak and electromagnetic, leaving out gravity.

Nambu shared half of the prestigious 10 million Swedish crown (1.4 million dollars) prize with Kobayashi of Japan's High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation and Maskawa of Kyoto University.

Kobayashi and Maskawa proposed the six types of quarks — up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. All were later discovered in high-energy particle physics experiments.

Kobayashi said the news came as a shock. “It is my great honour and I can’t believe this,” he said. But Maskawa said he was not surprised. “There is a pattern to how the Nobel prize is awarded. I did not think I would get the award up until last year, but I predicted it pretty much this year,” he was quoted as saying by Kyodo news agency.

The prize, awarded by the Nobel committee for Physics at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, was the second of this year's crop of Nobel prizes.

The prizes are handed out annually for achievements in science, peace, literature and economics. The prizes bearing the name of Alfred Nobel were first awarded in 1901 in accordance with the 1895 will of the Swedish dynamite millionaire. — Reuters