Science

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15:24 GMT

Physics Nobel for Symmetry Breaking

Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi, and Toshihide Maskawa have been awarded the Nobel prize in Physics for 2008. This award recognizes their work on issues related to symmetry and spontaneous symmetry breaking in nuclear and particle physics. However, the award comes with quite a bit of controversy for the ommission of Nicola Cabibbo, the 'C' in the CKM (Cabibbo-Kobayashi-Maskawa) matrix which describes how quarks change flavor under certain weak decays ('flavor changing'). Cabibbo is in fact noted for his 1963 proposal of θC, a measure which describes the mixing of down and strange quarks under weak interactions.

Kobayashi and Maskawa went on to generalize this idea to all quarks when in the late 1960s and early 1970s theory showed there were three families of quarks totaling six particles. Tommaso Dorigo's A Quantum Diaries Survivor blog has reaction from the Italian INFN to the omission of Cabibbo from the prize. We have to agree - they dropped the ball as the initial idea was clearly his and thus he should have been included.

Nambu's name appears in many areas of nuclear and particle physics. The Nobel was awarded for his work on the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking but he is also known for proposing the color charge of QCD (quantum chromodynamics) as well as massless Nambu-Goldstone bosons which appear in field theories with spontaneous symmetry breaking. This award is for his work in the 1960s which resulted in pions being recognized as the result of spontaneous breaking of an (inexact) axial-vector current symmetry. A more detailed explanation appears midway through this Cern Courier article.

That the Nobel committee recognized this theoretical work is a very good thing but it is sad that it will be tainted by ignoring Cabibbo's contribution.
No comments yet    07-Oct-2008


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