Wolf Prize in Physics

Last updated

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.

Contents

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

YearNameNationalityCitation
1978 Chien-Shiung Wu Flag of the United States.svg United States / Flag of the Republic of China.svg Republic of Chinafor her persistent and successful exploration of the weak interaction, which helped establish the precise form and the non-conservation of parity for this natural force.
1979 George Eugene Uhlenbeck Flag of the Netherlands.svg Netherlands / Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor his discovery, jointly with the late S. A. Goudsmit, of the electron spin.
Giuseppe Occhialini Flag of Italy.svg Italyfor his contributions to the discoveries of electron pair production and of the charged pion.
1980 Michael E. Fisher
Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdomfor pathbreaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior at transitions between the different thermodynamic phases of matter.
Leo P. Kadanoff Flag of the United States.svg United States
Kenneth G. Wilson
1981 Freeman Dyson Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdom / Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of the quantum theory of fields.
Gerard 't Hooft Flag of the Netherlands.svg Netherlands
Victor F. Weisskopf Flag of Austria.svg Austria / Flag of the United States.svg United States
1982 Leon M. Lederman Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor their experimental discovery of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation of quarks and leptons.
Martin Lewis Perl
1983/84 Erwin Hahn Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor his discovery of nuclear spin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency.
Peter B. Hirsch Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdomfor his development of the utilization of the transmission electron microscope as a universal instrument to study the structure of crystalline matter.
Theodore H. Maiman Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor his realization of the first operating laser, the pulsed three level ruby laser.
1985 Conyers Herring Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behaviour of electrons in metals.
Philippe Nozieres Flag of France.svg France
1986 Mitchell J. Feigenbaum Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character of non-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study of chaos.
Albert J. Libchaber Flag of France.svg France / Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor his brilliant experimental demonstration of the transition to turbulence and chaos in dynamic systems.
1987 Herbert Friedman Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor pioneering investigations in solar X-rays.
Bruno B. Rossi Flag of Italy.svg Italy / Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor the discovery of extra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes.
Riccardo Giacconi
1988 Roger Penrose Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdomfor 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
1989No award
1990 Pierre-Gilles de Gennes Flag of France.svg 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 Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdom / Flag of the United States.svg United States
1991 Maurice Goldhaber Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning the weak interactions involving leptons.
Valentine L. Telegdi Flag of Hungary.svg Hungary / Flag of Switzerland (Pantone).svg  Switzerland / Flag of the United States.svg United States
1992 Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor his discovery of an orbiting radio pulsar and its exploitation to verify the general theory of relativity to high precision.
1993 Benoît Mandelbrot Flag of France.svg France / Flag of the United States.svg United Statesby 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 Flag of Russia.svg Russiafor his contributions to the theory of superconductivity and to the theory of high-energy processes in astrophysics.
Yoichiro Nambu Flag of Japan.svg Japan / Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor 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.
1995/96No award
1996/97 John Archibald Wheeler Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor his seminal contributions to black holes physics, to quantum gravity, and to the theories of nuclear scattering and nuclear fission.
1998 Yakir Aharonov Flag of Israel.svg Israelfor 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 Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdom
1999 Dan Shechtman Flag of Israel.svg Israelfor 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. Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor their pioneering observations of astronomical phenomena by detection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field of neutrino astronomy.
Masatoshi Koshiba Flag of Japan.svg Japan
2001No award
2002/03 Bertrand I. Halperin Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor 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 Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdom / Flag of the United States.svg United States
2004 Robert Brout Flag of Belgium (civil).svg Belgiumfor 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 Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdom
2005 Daniel Kleppner Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor groundbreaking work in atomic physics of hydrogenic systems, including research on the hydrogen maser, Rydberg atoms and Bose–Einstein condensation.
2006/07 Albert Fert Flag of France.svg Francefor 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 Flag of Germany.svg Germany
2008No award
2009No award
2010 John F. Clauser Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor 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 Flag of France.svg France
Anton Zeilinger Flag of Austria.svg Austria
2011 Maximilian Haider Flag of Austria.svg Austriafor their development of aberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision, thus revolutionizing materials science.
Harald Rose Flag of Germany.svg Germany
Knut Urban
2012 Jacob D. Bekenstein Flag of Israel.svg Israelfor his work on black holes. [4]
2013 Peter Zoller Flag of Austria.svg Austriafor groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.
Ignacio Cirac Flag of Spain.svg Spain
2014No award
2015 James D. Bjorken Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor 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 Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor 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 Flag of Israel.svg Israelfor 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 Flag of Switzerland (Pantone).svg  Switzerlandfor the discovery of an extrasolar planet orbiting around a star similar to the sun.
Didier Queloz
2018 Charles H. Bennett Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor their collaborative work in the rapidly expanding field of quantum information science.
Gilles Brassard Flag of Canada (Pantone).svg Canada
2019No award
2020 Rafi Bistritzer Flag of Israel.svg Israelfor pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene. [5]
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero Flag of Spain.svg Spain
Allan H. MacDonald Flag of Canada (Pantone).svg Canada
2021 Giorgio Parisi Flag of Italy.svg Italyfor ground-breaking discoveries in disordered systems, particle physics and statistical physics. [6]
2022 Anne L'Huillier Flag of France.svg France / Flag of Sweden.svg Swedenfor pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics. [7]
Paul Corkum Flag of Canada (Pantone).svg Canada
Ferenc Krausz Flag of Hungary.svg Hungary / Flag of Austria.svg Austria
2023No award
2024 Martin Rees Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdomfor fundamental contributions to high-energy astrophysics, galaxies and structure formation, and cosmology. [8]
2025 James P. Eisenstein Flag of the United States.svg United Statesfor advancing our understanding of the surprising properties of two-dimensional electron systems in strong magnetic fields. [9]
Mordehai Heiblum Flag of Israel.svg Israel
Jainendra K. Jain Flag of India.svg India / Flag of the United States.svg United States

Laureates per country

Below is a chart of all laureates per country (updated to 2025 laureates). Some laureates are counted more than once if they have multiple citizenships.

CountryNumber of laureates
Flag of the United States.svg United States 33
Flag of the United Kingdom.svg United Kingdom 10
Flag of France.svg France 7
Flag of Israel.svg Israel 6
Flag of Austria.svg Austria 5
Flag of Italy.svg Italy 4
Flag of Germany.svg Germany 3
Flag of Canada (Pantone).svg Canada 3
Flag of Switzerland (Pantone).svg  Switzerland 3
Flag of Japan.svg Japan 2
Flag of Hungary.svg Hungary 2
Flag of Spain.svg Spain 2
Flag of the Netherlands.svg Netherlands 2
Flag of Belgium (civil).svg Belgium 2
Flag of the Republic of China.svg Republic of China 1
Flag of Russia.svg Russia 1
Flag of Sweden.svg Sweden 1
Flag of India.svg India 1

See also

References

  1. "Wolf prize goes to particle theorists" Physicsworld.com January 20, 2004
  2. 1 2 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
  9. Laureates 2025