NOBEL SEASON

Makoto Kobayashi Wins Nobel Prize in Physics

TSUKUBA, Japan - Makoto Kobayashi, 64, Professor Emeritus of KEK and
executive director of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science,
was awarded a 2008 Nobel Prize for Physics for the theory to explain the
origin of the broken symmetry which predicts the existence of at least
three families of quarks in nature. He shares the award with Toshihide
Maskawa, Professor of Kyoto Sangyo University in Kyoto, and Yoichiro
Nambu, Professor Emeritus of University of Chicago, who was awarded the
prize for the discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry
breaking in subatomic physics.

Kobayashi is a particle physics theorist at KEK since 1979. Kobayashi is
the first Nobel laureate directly associated with KEK. He became the
Director of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies (IPNS) in
2003, and Professor Emeritus in 2006.

"We are extremely proud," said KEK Director General Atsuto Suzuki. "not
only because he has been associated with our laboratory for three
decades, but that KEK has contributed to verify the matter-antimatter
asymmetry predicted by the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory in great detail
through our experiments."

The Belle experiment with the KEKB accelerator has produced billions of
particles called "B mesons" and "anti B mesons". A meson is a type of
composite particle made of a pair of quark and anti-quark. A B meson
contains a specific type of quark called "bottom".

In 2001, Belle observed large matter-antimatter asymmetry in B meson
decays as expected from the Kobayashi-Maskawa theory. The experiment has
been accumulating more data and the confidence level of the
Kobayashi-Maskawa theory has been further increased.

Kobayashi played a significant role for the success of the Belle
experiment. With his strong leadership as the Director of the IPNS, the
Belle experiment stayed as one of the most prominent high energy physics
experiments in the world over a decade.

"Quarks are the most basic building block of matter," explains
Kobayashi. "In 1973, when Maskawa and I published a paper, there were
only three types of quarks conceived in particle physics. We
investigated how adding three more types of quarks would solve the
puzzle of matter-antimatter asymmetry observed in the decays of K mesons."

After receiving his Ph.D at the Graduate School of Nagoya University,
Kobayashi started his career as a research associate at Kyoto
University. During his work at Kyoto University, Kobayashi published a
paper "CP Violation in the Renormalizable Theory of Weak Interaction",
written with Toshihide Maskawa, which is the second most cited high
energy physics paper of all time as of 2007.

"The Nobel Prize in Physics for Makoto Kobayashi and his colleagues is
well deserved," says Persis Drell, Director of Stanford Linear
Accelerator Center. "His visionary intuition about how nature might be
hiding its secrets ultimately led to the development of the extremely
successful B factory experiments at SLAC and KEK."

Kobayashi and Maskawa explained the broken symmetry of matter and
antimatter within the framework of the Standard Model, the basic theory
of how the universe operates, by predicting the existence of a third
generation of quarks then unknown. CP Violation, meaning symmetry
breaking of charge and parity, was precisely confirmed by the two
particle detectors: BaBar at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC),
USA, and Belle at KEK, Japan.

The other Nobel laureate Yoichiro Nambu revolutionized modern scientific
ideas about the nature of the most fundamental particles by introducing
his description of spontaneous symmetry breaking into particle physics
in the 1960's. His theories form an essential cornerstone of the
Standard Model, which explains in a unified way three of the four
fundamental forces of nature: strong, weak and electromagnetic. He has
significantly influenced the development of Quantum Chromodynamics, a
theory that describes certain interactions between quarks and between
protons and neutrons.

Pier Oddone, the Director General of Fermilab, commemorates: "Today's
Nobel Prize recognizes the pioneering development of a picture of nature
that has had a major impact on physics at Fermilab and at other
laboratories around the world."

In physics, "symmetry" means that a physical situation will be unchanged
under certain transformations. One of the important examples of broken
symmetry arose immediately after the Big Bang. The most basic form of
the Big Bang Theory predicts that equal amounts of matter and antimatter
should have been created at the early stage of the universe. They should
annihilate each other, but there was some matter remained. This is the
broken symmetry thought to be responsible for the visible parts of the
universe. New particle accelerators, such as LHC at CERN in Geneva,
proposed more advanced accelerators such as upgraded KEKB and
International Linear Collider, are expected to unravel some of the
mysteries of the universe.

Albrecht Wagner, the Director General of DESY says "My sincere
congratulations to our colleagues Kobayashi and Maskawa who have
developed their theory many years ago and whose work has recently became
a major focus for the experimental work at KEK and SLAC. These
state-of-the-art accelerators and detectors have shown the beauty and
validity of the theory with an astonishing accuracy."

Francois Le Diberder, spokesperson for the BaBar experiment, and Hassan
Jawahery, former spokesperson of BaBar, jointly speak of their
appreciation for Kobayashi and Maskawa's work: "The BaBar collaboration
extends its warmest congratulations to KEK and the whole Japanese
Particle Physics community for receiving the award of the 2008 Nobel
Prize to Prof Kobayashi and Prof Maskawa for their breakthrough leading
at once to the explanation of CP violation and to the prediction of the
third family of quarks and leptons. The BaBar and Belle collaborations'
most important achievement is the experimental validation of the CP
violation model they put forward."



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