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 most prestigious awards in those fields after the Nobel Prize. 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 | Name | Nationality | Citation |
| 1978 | Chien-Shiung Wu | United States / Republic of China | for her explorations of the weak interaction, helping establish the precise form and the non-conservation of parity for this natural force. |
| 1979 | George Eugene Uhlenbeck | Netherlands / United States | for his discovery, jointly with the late S. A. Goudsmit, of the electron spin. |
| 1979 | Giuseppe Occhialini | Italy | for his contributions to the discoveries of electron pair production and of the charged pion. |
| 1980 | Michael E. Fisher Leo P. Kadanoff Kenneth G. Wilson | United Kingdom United States United States | for pathbreaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior at transitions between the different thermodynamic phases of matter. |
| 1981 | Freeman J. Dyson Gerard 't Hooft Victor F. Weisskopf | United Kingdom / United States; Netherlands; Austria / United States | for their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of the quantum theory of fields. |
| 1982 | Leon M. Lederman Martin Lewis Perl | United States United States | for their experimental discovery of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation of quarks and leptons. |
| 1983/84 | Erwin Hahn | United States | for his discovery of nuclear spin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency. |
| 1983/84 | Peter B. Hirsch | United Kingdom | for his development of the utilization of the transmission electron microscope as a universal instrument to study the structure of crystalline matter. |
| 1983/84 | Theodore H. Maiman | United States | for his realization of the first operating laser, the pulsed three level ruby laser. |
| 1985 | Conyers Herring Philippe Nozieres | United States France | for their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behaviour of electrons in metals. |
| 1986 | Mitchell J. Feigenbaum | United States | for his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character of non-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study of chaos. |
| 1986 | Albert J. Libchaber | France / United States | for his brilliant experimental demonstration of the transition to turbulence and chaos in dynamic systems. |
| 1987 | Herbert Friedman | United States | for pioneering investigations in solar X-rays. |
| 1987 | Bruno B. Rossi Riccardo Giacconi | Italy / United States Italy / United States | for the discovery of extra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes. |
| 1988 | Roger Penrose Stephen W. Hawking | United Kingdom United Kingdom | 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. |
| 1989 | No award | ||
| 1990 | Pierre-Gilles de Gennes David J. Thouless | France; United Kingdom / United States | 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. |
| 1991 | Maurice Goldhaber Valentine L. Telegdi | United States; Switzerland / United States | for their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning the weak interactions involving leptons. |
| 1992 | Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. | United States | for his discovery of an orbiting radio pulsar and its exploitation to verify the general theory of relativity to high precision. |
| 1993 | Benoît Mandelbrot | France / United States | by recognizing the widespread occurrence of fractals and developing mathematical tools for describing them, he has changed our view of nature. |
| 1994/95 | Vitaly L. Ginzburg | Russia | for his contributions to the theory of superconductivity and to the theory of high-energy processes in astrophysics. |
| 1994/95 | Yoichiro Nambu | Japan / United States | 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. |
| 1995/96 | No award | ||
| 1996/97 | John Archibald Wheeler | United States | for his seminal contributions to black holes physics, to quantum gravity, and to the theories of nuclear scattering and nuclear fission. |
| 1998 | Yakir Aharonov Michael V. Berry | Israel United Kingdom | 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. |
| 1999 | Dan Shechtman | Israel | 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 | Raymond Davis, Jr. Masatoshi Koshiba | United States Japan | for their pioneering observations of astronomical phenomena by detection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field of neutrino astronomy. |
| 2001 | No award | ||
| 2002/03 | Bertrand I. Halperin Anthony J. Leggett | United States; United Kingdom / United States | 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. |
| 2004 | Robert Brout François Englert Peter W. Higgs | Belgium Belgium United Kingdom | 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. |
| 2005 | Daniel Kleppner | United States | for groundbreaking work in atomic physics of hydrogenic systems, including research on the hydrogen maser, Rydberg atoms and Bose–Einstein condensation. |
| 2006/07 | Albert Fert Peter Grünberg | France Germany | for their independent discovery of the giant magnetoresistance phenomenon, thereby launching a new field of research and applications known as spintronics, which utilizes the spin of the electron to store and transport information. |
| 2008 | No award | ||
| 2009 | No award | ||
| 2010 | John F. Clauser Alain Aspect Anton Zeilinger | United States France Austria | 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 thereof, using entangled quantum states. |
| 2011 | Maximilian Haider Harald Rose Knut Urban | Austria Germany Germany | for their development of aberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision, thus revolutionizing materials science. |
| 2012 | Jacob D. Bekenstein | Israel | for his work on black holes. |
| 2013 | Peter Zoller Ignacio Cirac | Austria Spain | for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases. |
| 2014 | No award | ||
| 2015 | James D. Bjorken | United States | for predicting scaling in deep inelastic scattering, leading to identification of nucleon's pointlike constituents. He made a crucial contribution for elucidating the nature of the strong force. |
| 2015 | Robert P. Kirshner | United States | for creating the group, environment and directions that allowed his graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to uncover the acceleration in the expansion of the universe. |
| 2016 | Yoseph Imry | Israel | for his work in mesoscopic physics – a branch of physics that studies objects that are smaller than macroscopic objects but bigger than atoms. |
| 2017 | Michel Mayor Didier Queloz | Switzerland Switzerland | for the discovery of an extrasolar planet orbiting around a star similar to the sun. |
| 2018 | Charles H. Bennett Gilles Brassard | United States Canada | for their collaborative work in the rapidly expanding field of quantum information science. |
| 2019 | No award | ||
| 2020 | Rafi Bistritzer Pablo Jarillo-Herrero Allan H. MacDonald | Israel Spain Canada | for pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene. |