Stockholm - US researcher Yoichiro Nambu and his Japanese colleagues Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa have won this year's Nobel Prize for Physics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced in Stockholm on Tuesday.
Their discoveries were linked to describing the smallest building blocks in nature and nature's order, the academy said.
The academy cited Nambu of the Enrico Fermi Institute at the University of Chicago "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics."
Kobayashi and Maskawa were cited "for the discovery of the origin of broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature."