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Wolf Prize in Physics

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Wolf Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by the Wolf Foundation in Israel. It is one of the six Wolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are in Agriculture, Chemistry, Mathematics, Medicine and Arts.

The Wolf Prizes in physics and chemistry are often considered the second most prestigious awards in those fields, after the Nobel Prize.[1][2][3] The prize in physics has gained a reputation for identifying future winners of the Nobel Prize – from the 26 prizes awarded between 1978 and 2010, fourteen winners have gone on to win the Nobel Prize, five of those in the following year.[2]

Laureates

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Year Name Nationality Citation
1978 Chien-Shiung Wu  United States /  Republic of China for her explorations of the weak interaction, helping establish the precise form and the non-conservation of parity for this natural force.
1979 George Eugene Uhlenbeck  Netherlands /  United States for his discovery, jointly with the late S. A. Goudsmit, of the electron spin.
Giuseppe Occhialini  Italy for his contributions to the discoveries of electron pair production and of the charged pion.
1980 Michael E. Fisher
 United Kingdom for pathbreaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior at transitions between the different thermodynamic phases of matter.
Leo P. Kadanoff  United States
Kenneth G. Wilson
1981 Freeman Dyson  United Kingdom /  United States for their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of the quantum theory of fields.
Gerard 't Hooft  Netherlands
Victor F. Weisskopf  Austria /  United States
1982 Leon M. Lederman  United States for their experimental discovery of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation of quarks and leptons.
Martin Lewis Perl
1983/84 Erwin Hahn  United States for his discovery of nuclear spin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency.
Peter B. Hirsch  United Kingdom for his development of the utilization of the transmission electron microscope as a universal instrument to study the structure of crystalline matter.
Theodore H. Maiman  United States for his realization of the first operating laser, the pulsed three level ruby laser.
1985 Conyers Herring  United States for their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behaviour of electrons in metals.
Philippe Nozieres  France
1986 Mitchell J. Feigenbaum  United States for his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character of non-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study of chaos.
Albert J. Libchaber  France /  United States for his brilliant experimental demonstration of the transition to turbulence and chaos in dynamic systems.
1987 Herbert Friedman  United States for pioneering investigations in solar X-rays.
Bruno B. Rossi  Italy /  United States for the discovery of extra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes.
Riccardo Giacconi
1988 Roger Penrose  United Kingdom for their brilliant development of the theory of general relativity, in which they have shown the necessity for cosmological singularities and have elucidated the physics of black holes. In this work they have greatly enlarged our understanding of the origin and possible fate of the Universe.
Stephen W. Hawking
1989 No award
1990 Pierre-Gilles de Gennes  France; for a wide variety of pioneering contributions to our understanding of the organization of complex condensed matter systems, de Gennes especially for his work on macromolecular matter and liquid crystals and Thouless for his on disordered and low-dimensional systems.
David J. Thouless  United Kingdom /  United States
1991 Maurice Goldhaber  United States for their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning the weak interactions involving leptons.
Valentine L. Telegdi  Hungary /   Switzerland /  United States
1992 Joseph H. Taylor, Jr.  United States for his discovery of an orbiting radio pulsar and its exploitation to verify the general theory of relativity to high precision.
1993 Benoît Mandelbrot  France /  United States by recognizing the widespread occurrence of fractals and developing mathematical tools for describing them, he has changed our view of nature.
1994/95 Vitaly L. Ginzburg  Russia for his contributions to the theory of superconductivity and to the theory of high-energy processes in astrophysics.
Yoichiro Nambu  Japan /  United States for his contribution to elementary particle theory, including recognition of the role played by spontaneous symmetry breaking in analogy with superconductivity theory, and the discovery of the color symmetry of the strong interactions.
1995/96 No award
1996/97 John Archibald Wheeler  United States for his seminal contributions to black holes physics, to quantum gravity, and to the theories of nuclear scattering and nuclear fission.
1998 Yakir Aharonov  Israel for the discovery of quantum topological and geometrical phases. specifically the Aharonov–Bohm effect, the Berry phase, and their incorporation into many fields of physics.
Michael V. Berry  United Kingdom
1999 Dan Shechtman  Israel for the experimental discovery of quasi-crystals, non-periodic solids having long-range order, which inspired the exploration of a new fundamental state of matter.
2000 Raymond Davis, Jr.  United States for their pioneering observations of astronomical phenomena by detection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field of neutrino astronomy.
Masatoshi Koshiba  Japan
2001 No award
2002/03 Bertrand I. Halperin  United States for key insights into the broad range of condensed matter physics: Leggett on superfluidity of the light helium isotope and macroscopic quantum phenomena; and Halperin on two- dimensional melting, disordered systems and strongly interacting electrons.
Anthony J. Leggett  United Kingdom /  United States
2004 Robert Brout  Belgium for pioneering work that has led to the insight of mass generation whenever a local gauge symmetry is realized asymmetrically in the world of sub-atomic particles.
François Englert
Peter W. Higgs  United Kingdom
2005 Daniel Kleppner  United States for groundbreaking work in atomic physics of hydrogenic systems, including research on the hydrogen maser, Rydberg atoms and Bose–Einstein condensation.
2006/07 Albert Fert  France for their independent discovery of the giant magnetoresistance phenomenon (GMR), thereby launching a new field of research and applications known as spintronics, which utilizes the spin of the electron to store and transport information.
Peter Grünberg  Germany
2008 No award
2009 No award
2010 John F. Clauser  United States for their fundamental conceptual and experimental contributions to the foundations of quantum physics, specifically an increasingly sophisticated series of tests of Bell's inequalities, or extensions thereof, using entangled quantum states.
Alain Aspect  France
Anton Zeilinger  Austria
2011 Maximilian Haider  Austria for their development of aberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision, thus revolutionizing materials science.
Harald Rose  Germany
Knut Urban
2012 Jacob D. Bekenstein  Israel for his work on black holes.[4]
2013 Peter Zoller  Austria for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.
Ignacio Cirac  Spain
2014 No award
2015 James D. Bjorken  United States for predicting scaling in deep inelastic scattering, leading to identification of nucleon's pointlike constituents. He made a crucial contribution for elucidating the nature of the strong force.
Robert P. Kirshner  United States for creating the group, environment and directions that allowed his graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to uncover the acceleration in the expansion of the universe.
2016 Yoseph Imry  Israel for his work in mesoscopic physics – a branch of physics that studies objects that are smaller than macroscopic (visible to the naked eye) objects but bigger than atoms.
2017 Michel Mayor   Switzerland for the discovery of an extrasolar planet orbiting around a star similar to the sun.
Didier Queloz
2018 Charles H. Bennett  United States for their collaborative work in the rapidly expanding field of quantum information science.
Gilles Brassard  Canada
2019 No award
2020 Rafi Bistritzer  Israel for pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene.[5]
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero  Spain
Allan H. MacDonald  Canada
2021 Giorgio Parisi  Italy for ground-breaking discoveries in disordered systems, particle physics and statistical physics.[6]
2022 Anne L'Huillier  France /  Sweden for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics.[7]
Paul Corkum  Canada
Ferenc Krausz  Hungary /  Austria
2023 No award
2024 Martin Rees  United Kingdom for fundamental contributions to high-energy astrophysics, galaxies and structure formation, and cosmology.[8]

Laureates per country

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Below is a chart of all laureates per country (updated to 2024 laureates). Some laureates are counted more than once if they have multiple citizenships.

Country Number of laureates
 United States 31
 United Kingdom 10
 France 7
 Israel 5
 Austria 5
 Italy 4
 Germany 3
 Canada 3
  Switzerland 3
 Japan 2
 Hungary 2
 Spain 2
 Netherlands 2
 Belgium 2
 Republic of China 1
 Russia 1
 Sweden 1

See also

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References

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  1. ^ "Wolf prize goes to particle theorists" Physicsworld.com January 20, 2004
  2. ^ a b Harris, Margaret (November 2010). "Gongs away". Physics World. 23 (11). Bristol: 46–47. Bibcode:2010PhyW...23k..46H. doi:10.1088/2058-7058/23/11/46.
  3. ^ Basolo, F: From Coello to Inorganic Chemistry: A Lifetime of Reactions, page 65, Springer, 2002
  4. ^ Institute for Advanced Study - Wolf Prize 2012 Archived 2012-01-22 at the Wayback Machine
  5. ^ Laureates 2020
  6. ^ Laureate 2021
  7. ^ Laureates 2022
  8. ^ Laureates 2024
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