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.^[1]^[2]^[3] 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.^[2]

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	United Kingdom	for pathbreaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior at transitions between the different thermodynamic phases of matter.
	Leo P. Kadanoff	United States
	Kenneth G. Wilson	United States
1981	Freeman Dyson	United Kingdom / United States	for their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of the quantum theory of fields.
	Gerard 't Hooft	Netherlands
	Victor F. Weisskopf	Austria / United States
1982	Leon M. Lederman	United States	for their experimental discovery of unexpected new particles establishing a third generation of quarks and leptons.
1982	Martin Lewis Perl	United States
1983/84	Erwin Hahn	United States	for his discovery of nuclear spin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency.
	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.
	Theodore H. Maiman	United States	for his realization of the first operating laser, the pulsed three level ruby laser.
1985	Conyers Herring	United States	for their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behaviour of electrons in metals.
1985	Philippe Nozieres	France
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.
	Bruno B. Rossi	Italy / United States	for the discovery of extra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes.
	Riccardo Giacconi	Italy / United States
1988	Roger Penrose	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.
1988	Stephen W. Hawking	United Kingdom
1989	No award
1990	Pierre-Gilles de Gennes	France;	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.
1990	David J. Thouless	United Kingdom / United States
1991	Maurice Goldhaber	United States	for their separate seminal contributions to nuclear and particle physics, particularly those concerning the weak interactions involving leptons.
1991	Valentine L. Telegdi	Hungary / Switzerland / United States
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	Israel	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.
1998	Michael V. Berry	United Kingdom
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.	United States	for their pioneering observations of astronomical phenomena by detection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field of neutrino astronomy.
2000	Masatoshi Koshiba	Japan
2001	No award
2002/03	Bertrand I. Halperin	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.
2002/03	Anthony J. Leggett	United Kingdom / United States
2004	Robert Brout	Belgium	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.
	François Englert	Belgium
	Peter W. Higgs	United Kingdom
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	France	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.
2006/07	Peter Grünberg	Germany
2008	No award
2009	No award
2010	John F. Clauser	United States	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.
	Alain Aspect	France
	Anton Zeilinger	Austria
2011	Maximilian Haider	Austria	for their development of aberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms with picometer precision, thus revolutionizing materials science.
	Harald Rose	Germany
	Knut Urban	Germany
2012	Jacob D. Bekenstein	Israel	for his work on black holes.^[4]
2013	Peter Zoller	Austria	for groundbreaking theoretical contributions to quantum information processing, quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases.
2013	Ignacio Cirac	Spain
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 (visible to the naked eye) objects but bigger than atoms.
2017	Michel Mayor	Switzerland	for the discovery of an extrasolar planet orbiting around a star similar to the sun.
2017	Didier Queloz	Switzerland
2018	Charles H. Bennett	United States	for their collaborative work in the rapidly expanding field of quantum information science.
2018	Gilles Brassard	Canada
2019	No award
2020	Rafi Bistritzer	Israel	for pioneering theoretical and experimental work on twisted bilayer graphene.^[5]
	Pablo Jarillo-Herrero	Spain
	Allan H. MacDonald	Canada
2021	Giorgio Parisi	Italy	for ground-breaking discoveries in disordered systems, particle physics and statistical physics.^[6]
2022	Anne L'Huillier	France / Sweden	for pioneering contributions to ultrafast laser science and attosecond physics.^[7]
	Paul Corkum	Canada
	Ferenc Krausz	Hungary / Austria
2023	No award
2024	Martin Rees	United Kingdom	for fundamental contributions to high-energy astrophysics, galaxies and structure formation, and cosmology.^[8]

Laureates per country

Below is a chart of all laureates per country (updated to 2024 laureates). Some laureates are counted more than once if they have multiple citizenships.

Country	Number of laureates
United States	31
United Kingdom	10
France	7
Israel	5
Austria	5
Italy	4
Germany	3
Canada	3
Switzerland	3
Japan	2
Hungary	2
Spain	2
Netherlands	2
Belgium	2
Republic of China	1
Russia	1
Sweden	1