The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences will award the Nobel Prize in Physics to an American and two Japanese scientists jointly for the year 2008. One-half of the prize will go to Yoichiro Nambu, of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago, for discovering ‘spontaneous broken symmetry‘ in subatomic physics.

Nambu will receive US $650,000, while the other two Japanese physicists, Makoto Kobayashi from High Energy Accelerator Research Organization and Toshihide Maskawa from the Yukawa Institute for Theoretical Physics (YITP) at Kyoto University,
will split that sum, taking about $325,000 apiece. Yoichiro Nambu, an 87-year-old scientist actually hails from Japan and has been living in the US since the early 50s.

Reportedly, Prof Nambu was long due for this acknowledgement for his contribution in the field of Physics. Numerous Chicago physicists had rallied for Nambu to receive the prize, and the Nobel Prize Committee eventually obliged.