The announcement was made in Stockholm this morning by Gunnar Oqvist, Secretary of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.
Yoichiro Nambu, now of the Univeristy of Chicago, was chosen for his discovery of the mechanism of 'spontaneous broken symmetry in sub-atomic physics'.
He shares the prestigious 10m Swedish kronor (€1m) prize with Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, who were recognised for work that predicted the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.
Prof Nambu is one of the leading figures in the development of modern particle physics and made seminal contributions that introduced the concept of broken symmetry to the field.
Dr Kobayashi, of the Japanese High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation, and Dr Maskawa of Tokyo University laid the theoretical foundations for modern understanding of how the laws of physics differ for matter and anti-matter.
