Makoto Kobayashi
On October 7, 2008, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics to three scientists for their work in subatomic physics symmetry breaking. Yoichiro Nambu, of the University of Chicago, won half of the prize for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous broken symmetry in the context of the strong interactions, specifically chiral symmetry breaking. Physicists Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa, of Kyoto University, shared the other half of the prize for discovering the origin of the explicit breaking of CP symmetry in the weak interactions. This origin is ultimately reliant on the Higgs mechanism, but, so far understood as a "just so" feature of Higgs couplings, not a spontaneously broken symmetry phenomenon.