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Japanese-born American shares physics prize

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism in subatomic physics known as spontaneous broken symmetry.

STOCKHOLM, Sweden (AP) - The Nobel Prize in physics is going to two Japanese citizens and a Japanese-born American.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that Yoichiro Nambu of the University of Chicago won half of the prize for the discovery of a mechanism in subatomic physics known as spontaneous broken symmetry. The two Japanese physicists shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the broken symmetry that predicts the existence of at least three families of quarks in nature.

In its citation that academy explains that "spontaneous broken symmetry conceals nature's order under an apparently jumbled surface." It says Nambu's theories "permeate the standard model of elementary particle physics." That model, it says, "unifies the smallest building blocks of all matter and 3 of nature's four forces in one single theory."

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