Portal:Physics/Selected article/November 2010

The theme for this month is the recipients of the Nobel Prize in Physics in the new millennium, between 2010 and the year 2001.

Wilhelm Röntgen (1845–1923), the first recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

The Nobel Prize in Physics (Swedish: Nobelpriset i fysik) is awarded once a year by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. It is one of the five Nobel Prizes established by the will of Alfred Nobel in 1895 and awarded since 1901. The first Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen "in recognition of the extraordinary services he has rendered by the discovery of the remarkable rays (or x-rays)." This award is administered by the Nobel Foundation. A maximum of three Nobel laureates and two different works may be selected for the Nobel Prize in Physics. The nomination and selection process for the prize in Physics is long and rigorous. This is a key reason it has grown in importance over the years to become the most important prize in Physics.

• 2010 awarded jointly to Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov "for groundbreaking experiments regarding the two-dimensional material graphene"
• 2009 divided, one half awarded to Charles Kuen Kao ' for groundbreaking achievements concerning the transmission of light in fibers for optical communication ',the other half jointly to Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith "for the invention of an imaging semiconductor circuit – the CCD sensor ".
• 2008 divided, one half awarded to Yoichiro Nambu "for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in subatomic physics ",the other half jointly to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa "for the discovery of the origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature".
• 2007 awarded jointly to Albert Fert and Peter Grünberg "for the discovery of Giant Magnetoresistance ."
• 2006 awarded jointly to John C. Mather and George F. Smoot "for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation."
• 2005 divided, one half awarded to Roy J. Glauber "for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence", and the other half jointly to John L. Hall and Theodor W. Hänsch "for their contributions to the development of laser-based precision spectroscopy, including the optical frequency comb technique".
• 2004 awarded jointly to David J. Gross, H. David Politzer and Frank Wilczek " for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction".
• 2003 awarded jointly to Alexei A. Abrikosov, Vitaly L. Ginzburg and Anthony J. Leggett" for pioneering contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids ".
• 2002 divided, one half jointly to Raymond Davis Jr. and Masatoshi Koshiba " for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, in particular for the detection of cosmic neutrinos " and the other half to Riccardo Giacconi " for pioneering contributions to astrophysics, which have led to the discovery of cosmic X-ray sources".
• 2001 awarded jointly to Eric A. Cornell, Wolfgang Ketterle and Carl E. Wieman " for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates ".
• See also: List of Nobel laureates in Physics