Yoichiro Nambu

Yoichiro Nambu (1921–2015) was a Japanese-American theoretical physicist whose work forged the bridge between condensed matter physics and particle physics. In 1960, Nambu showed that superconductivity could be understood as a spontaneously broken gauge symmetry, adapting the Landau-Ginzburg theory of phase transitions to the quantum vacuum. This insight — that the same mathematics describing Cooper pairs in metals could describe the origin of particle masses — was the conceptual seed from which the Higgs mechanism grew. Nambu shared the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for his discovery of the mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking in subatomic physics, a discovery that revealed the deep structural unity between the smallest and largest scales of physical organization.