Nobel prize won for discoveries in particle physics

TWO Japanese citizens and an American won the 2008 Nobel Prize for physics for discoveries that help explain the behaviour of the smallest particles of matter.

American Yoichiro Nambu, 87, of the University of Chicago, won half of the 10 million kronor (€1.03m) prize for the discovery of a mechanism called spontaneous broken symmetry.

Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa of Japan shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicted the existence of at least three families of quarks (types of subatomic particles) in nature.