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 second-most prestigious awards in those fields, after the Nobel Prize."Wolf prize goes to particle theorists" Physicsworld.com January 20, 2004Basolo, F: From Coello to Inorganic Chemistry: A Lifetime of Reactions, page 65, Springer, 2002 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 Laureate Country Citation Image Name 1978 Chien-Shiung Wu "For her persistent and successful exploration of the weak interaction which helped establish the precise form and the non conservation of parity for this new natural force." 1979 George E. Uhlenbeck "For his discovery, jointly with the late Samuel A .Goudsmit, of the electron spin." Giuseppe Occhialini "For his contributions to the discovery of electron pair production and of the charged pion." 1980 Kenneth G. Wilson "For path breaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior at transitions between the different thermodynamic phases of matter." Leo P. Kadanoff Michael E. Fisher 1981 Freeman J. Dyson "For their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of the quantum theory of fields." Gerard 't Hooft Victor F. Weisskopf 1982 Leon M. Lederman "For their experimental discovery of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation quarks and leptons." Martin L. Perl 1983 No award 1984 Erwin L. Hahn "For his discovery of nuclear spin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency." Peter B. Hirsch "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 "For his realization of the first operating laser, the pulsed three level ruby laser." 1985 Conyers Herring "For their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behavior of electrons in metals." Philippe Nozières 1986 Albert J. Libchaber "For his brilliant experimental demonstration of the transition to turbulence and chaos in dynamical systems." Mitchell J. Feigenbaum "For his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character of non-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study of chaos." 1987 Bruno B. Rossi "For the discovery of extra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes." Riccardo Giacconi Herbert Friedman "For pioneering investigations in solar X-rays." 1988 Roger Penrose "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." Stephen W. Hawking 1989 No award 1990 David J. Thouless "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." Pierre-Gilles de Gennes 1991 Maurice Goldhaber "For their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning the weak interactions involving leptons." Valentine L. Telegdi 1992 Joseph H. Taylor Jr. "For his discovery of an orbiting radio pulsar and its exploitation to verify the general theory of relativity to high precision." 1993 Benoit B. Mandelbrot "By recognizing the widespread occurrence of fractals and developing mathematical tools for describing them, he has changed our view of nature." 1994/5 Vitaly L. Ginzburg "For his contributions to the theory of superconductivity and to the theory of high-energy processes in astrophysics." Yoichiro Nambu "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." 1996/7 John A. Wheeler "For his seminal contributions to black holes physics, to quantum gravity, and to the theories of nuclear scattering and nuclear fission." 1998 Michael V. Berry "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" Yakir Aharonov 1999 Dan Shechtman "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 Masatoshi Koshiba "For their pioneering observations of astronomical phenomena by detection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field of neutrino astronomy." Raymond Davis Jr. 2001 No award 2002/3 Anthony J. Leggett "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." Bertrand Halperin 2004 François Englert "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." Peter Higgs Robert Brout 2005 Daniel Kleppner "For groundbreaking work in atomic physics of hydrogenic systems, including research on the hydrogen maser, Rydberg atoms and Bose-Einstein condensation." 2006/7 Albert Fert "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." Peter Grünberg 2008 No award 2009 No award 2010 Alain Aspect "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 there of using entangled quantum states." Anton Zeilinger John F. Clauser 2011 Harald Rose "For their development of aberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision, thus revolutionizing materials science." Knut Urban Maximilian Haider 2012 Jacob Bekenstein "For his work on astronomical super-massive objects called ‘black holes’ that showed they can possess a statistical-thermodynamic property called entropy even though the internal dynamics could not be known. This work created an entire field of black hole dynamics which has become a cornerstone in the important theoretical physics areas of quantum gravity and strings." 2013 Juan Ignacio Cirac "For groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases." Peter Zoller 2014 No award 2015 James D. Bjorken "For predicting scaling in deep inelastic scattering, leading to identification of nucleon’s pointlike constituents." Robert P. Kirshner "For forging the path to supernova cosmology through his observations and insights." 2016 Yoseph Imry "For pioneering studies of the physics of mesoscopic and random systems." 2017 Didier Queloz "For the first discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar-type star." Michel Mayor 2018 Charles H. Bennett "For founding and advancing the fields of Quantum Cryptography and Quantum Teleportation." Gilles Brassard 2019 No award 2020 Rafi Bistritzer "For pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene." Pablo Jarillo-Herrero Allan H. MacDonald 2021 Giorgio Parisi "For ground-breaking discoveries in disordered systems, particle physics and statistical physics." 2022 Anne L'Huillier "For pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics." Paul Corkum Ferenc Krausz 2023 No award 2024 Martin Rees "For fundamental contributions to high-energy astrophysics, galaxies and structure formation, and cosmology." 2025 Jainendra K. Jain "For advancing our understanding of the surprising properties of two-dimensional electron systems in strong magnetic fields" Mordehai Heiblum James P. Eisenstein 2026 Immanuel Bloch "For transformative, widely applicable advances in the control of ultracold atomic systems." Wolf Foundation 2026 Jun Ye / Wolf Foundation 2026

Number of laureates per country CountryNumber 37 7 7 6 4 3 2 2 22 2 1 1 1 1

Wolf Prize in Physics

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