Breaking News From Broken Symmetries : Nobel Prize in Physics 2008

The breaking news of this year in physics is a honor to three physicists who working on the spontaneous symmetries breaking. One of them is Prof. Y. Nambu from the Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago ,who got a half of the sharing prize. He got a prize for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics. The second is Prof. Makoto Kobayashi from the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization, Japan and the third one is Prof. Toshihide Maskawa from Kyoto University. Each of them got quarter of the sharing prize. Both proposed the theory for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.

Anyway, in the standard model, spontaneous symmetry breaking is accomplished by using the Higgs boson and is responsible for the masses of the W and Z bosons. A slightly more technical presentation of this mechanism is given in the article on the Yukawa interaction, where it is shown how spontaneous symmetry breaking can be used to give mass to fermions. The picture on the right side is a famous "Mexican Hat" which describe the spontaneous symmetry broken.