Wolf Prize in Physics

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.

The Wolf Prizes in physics and chemistry are often considered the most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize. 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.

Laureates

Year	Name	Nationality	Citation
1978	Chien-Shiung Wu	United States, (Chinese American)	for her explorations of the weak interaction, helping establish the precise form and the non-conservation of parity for this natural force.
1979	George Eugene Uhlenbeck	Netherlands / United States	for his discovery, jointly with the late S. A. Goudsmit, of the electron spin.
	Giuseppe Occhialini	Italy	for his contributions to the discoveries of electron pair production and of the charged pion.
1980	Michael E. Fisher Leo P. Kadanoff Kenneth G. Wilson	United Kingdom United States United States	for pathbreaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior at transitions between the different thermodynamic phases of matter.
1981	Freeman J. Dyson Gerard 't Hooft Victor F. Weisskopf	United Kingdom / United States; Netherlands; Austria / United States	for their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of the quantum theory of fields.
1982	Leon M. Lederman Martin Lewis Perl	United States United States	for their experimental discovery of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation of quarks and leptons.
1983/84	Erwin Hahn	United States	for his discovery of nuclear spin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency.
	Peter B. Hirsch	United Kingdom	for his development of the utilization of the transmission electron microscope as a universal instrument to study the structure of crystalline matter.
	Theodore H. Maiman	United States	for his realization of the first operating laser, the pulsed three level ruby laser.
1985	Conyers Herring Philippe Nozieres	United States France	for their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behaviour of electrons in metals.
1986	Mitchell J. Feigenbaum	United States	for his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character of non-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study of chaos.
	Albert J. Libchaber	France / United States	for his brilliant experimental demonstration of the transition to turbulence and chaos in dynamic systems.
1987	Herbert Friedman	United States	for pioneering investigations in solar X-rays.
	Bruno B. Rossi Riccardo Giacconi	Italy / United States Italy / United States	for the discovery of extra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes.
1988	Roger Penrose Stephen W. Hawking	United Kingdom United Kingdom	for 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.
1989	No award
1990	Pierre-Gilles de Gennes David J. Thouless	France; United Kingdom / United States	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.
1991	Maurice Goldhaber Valentine L. Telegdi	United States; Switzerland / United States	for their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning the weak interactions involving leptons.
1992	Joseph H. Taylor, Jr.	United States	for his discovery of an orbiting radio pulsar and its exploitation to verify the general theory of relativity to high precision.
1993	Benoît Mandelbrot	France / United States	by 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	Russia	for his contributions to the theory of superconductivity and to the theory of high-energy processes in astrophysics.
	Yoichiro Nambu	Japan / United States	for 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.
1995/96	No award
1996/97	John Archibald Wheeler	United States	for his seminal contributions to black holes physics, to quantum gravity, and to the theories of nuclear scattering and nuclear fission.
1998	Yakir Aharonov Michael V. Berry	Israel United Kingdom	for the discovery of quantum topological and geometrical phases. specifically the Aharonov–Bohm effect, the Berry phase, and their incorporation into many fields of physics.
1999	Dan Shechtman	Israel	for 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. Masatoshi Koshiba	United States Japan	for their pioneering observations of astronomical phenomena by detection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field of neutrino astronomy.
2001	No award
2002/03	Bertrand I. Halperin Anthony J. Leggett	United States; United Kingdom / United States	for 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.
2004	Robert Brout François Englert Peter W. Higgs	Belgium Belgium United Kingdom	for 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.
2005	Daniel Kleppner	United States	for groundbreaking work in atomic physics of hydrogenic systems, including research on the hydrogen maser, Rydberg atoms and Bose–Einstein condensation.
2006/07	Albert Fert Peter Grünberg	France Germany	for 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.
2008	No award
2009	No award
2010	John F. Clauser Alain Aspect Anton Zeilinger	United States France Austria	for 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.
2011	Maximilian Haider Harald Rose Knut Urban	Austria Germany Germany	for their development of aberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision, thus revolutionizing materials science.
2012	Jacob D. Bekenstein	Israel	for his work on black holes.
2013	Peter Zoller Ignacio Cirac	Austria Spain	for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.
2014	No award
2015	James D. Bjorken	United States	for 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	United States	for 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	Israel	for 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.

External links

• Wolf Prizes 2015