Physics prize

The Nobel Prize category for physics.

People in Physics prize

25 profiles

Scientist

Marie Curie

Discovering polonium and radium.

Physicist

Albert Einstein

Developing the theory of relativity.

Physicist

Pierre Curie

Discovering polonium and radium with Marie Curie.

Physicist

C. V. Raman

Discovering how scattered light reveals the molecules it meets.

Physicist

John Bardeen

Co-inventing the transistor and helping explain superconductivity.

Physicist

Enrico Fermi

Leading the first controlled, self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction.

Physicist

Niels Bohr

Explaining atomic energy levels and helping establish quantum physics.

Physicist

Abdus Salam

Helping develop electroweak theory, which connects two fundamental forces.

Physicist

Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar

Discovering the mass limit beyond which a white dwarf cannot support itself.

Physicist

Donna Strickland

Developing a method for producing extremely intense, short laser pulses.

Physicist

Max Born

Explaining quantum waves in terms of probability.

Physicist

Wolfgang Pauli

Formulating the exclusion principle that helps explain atomic structure.

Physicist

John Clauser

Testing quantum entanglement in experiments that challenged classical ideas about reality.

Physicist

William Henry Bragg

Developing X-ray crystallography with his son, revealing how atoms are arranged in crystals.

Physicist

Isidor Rabi

Developing a resonance method for measuring atomic nuclei’s magnetic properties.

Physicist

Louis de Broglie

Proposing that particles of matter also behave as waves.

Physicist

Reinhard Genzel

Tracking stars that revealed a supermassive black hole at the Milky Way’s centre.

Physicist

Rainer Weiss

Helping design LIGO, which detected gravitational waves from colliding black holes.

Physicist

Alain Aspect

Testing quantum entanglement with landmark experiments using photons.

Physicist

Anton Zeilinger

Testing quantum entanglement and pioneering the transfer of quantum information.

Physicist

Ferenc Krausz

Generating isolated attosecond light pulses to investigate electrons in motion.

Physicist

Pierre Agostini

Developing attosecond light-pulse methods that made electron motion accessible to experiment.

Physicist

Hans Bethe

Explaining the nuclear reactions that power stars.

Physicist

Lev Landau

Explaining superfluid helium and building influential theories of matter.

Physicist

Julius von Mayer

Helping establish the principle of conservation of energy.