Awards Record

Physics

Nobel Prize in Physics: winners and how it is awarded

The Nobel Prize in Physics is one of the five prizes set out in the will of Alfred Nobel and has been awarded since 1901. Laureates are chosen by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences after an invited nomination round that closes on 31 January.2,1,5

Awarded byRoyal Swedish Academy of Sciences
Established1901
FrequencyAnnual
Prize valueSEK 11.0 million per full Nobel Prize, shared equally or by the committee's division where there are several laureates (as of 2023 (amount set for 2023 on the official prize amounts page))

How the winner is chosen

Nominations are by invitation. The Nobel Prize organisation says thousands of members of academies, university professors, scientists, previous laureates and others are asked to propose candidates, and the deadline for submissions is midnight on 31 January. A Nobel Committee of five to ten members reviews the candidates and consults experts, and the prize-awarding institution then takes a final vote. For physics the selecting institution is the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which announces the prize in early October.

Winners

  1. 2026Francis Halzen10,12Work on a rare group of high energy neutrinos and a central role in building the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, as reported by AP and Al Jazeera
  2. 2025John Clarke, Michel H. Devoret, John M. Martinis9,6Discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunnelling and energy quantisation in an electric circuit
  3. 2024John J. Hopfield, Geoffrey Hinton7Foundational discoveries and inventions that enable machine learning with artificial neural networks
  4. 2023Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, Anne L'Huillier8Experimental methods that generate attosecond pulses of light for the study of electron dynamics in matter
  5. 2022Alain Aspect, John F. Clauser, Anton Zeilinger13Experiments with entangled photons, establishing the violation of Bell inequalities and pioneering quantum information science
  6. 2021Syukuro Manabe, Klaus Hasselmann, Giorgio Parisi14Manabe and Hasselmann for physical modelling of Earth's climate, Parisi for the interplay of disorder and fluctuations in physical systems
  7. 2020Roger Penrose, Reinhard Genzel, Andrea Ghez15Penrose for showing black hole formation is a robust prediction of general relativity, Genzel and Ghez for a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy
  8. 2019James Peebles, Michel Mayor, Didier Queloz16Peebles for theoretical discoveries in physical cosmology, Mayor and Queloz for the discovery of an exoplanet orbiting a solar type star
  9. 2018Arthur Ashkin, Gérard Mourou, Donna Strickland17Ashkin for optical tweezers, Mourou and Strickland for a method of generating high intensity, ultra short optical pulses
  10. 2017Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, Kip S. Thorne18Decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves
  11. 2016David J. Thouless, F. Duncan M. Haldane, J. Michael Kosterlitz19Theoretical discoveries of topological phase transitions and topological phases of matter

Notable facts

Nominee names and other nomination details are kept secret and the Nobel Prize organisation says they cannot be revealed until 50 years later.4

The official prize amounts page states that the Nobel Prize amount for 2023 was set at SEK 11.0 million per full prize.3

Since 1974 the statutes say a prize cannot be awarded posthumously unless death has occurred after the announcement.11

Sources

  1. Nobel Prize Outreach, Prize announcement dates (2026)
  2. Nobel Prize Outreach, Nomination and selection of Nobel Prize laureates
  3. Nobel Prize Outreach, The Nobel Prize amounts (2023)
  4. Nobel Prize Outreach, Nomination archive
  5. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes
  6. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2025 (October 2025)
  7. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2024 (October 2024)
  8. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2023 (October 2023)
  9. Nobel Prize Outreach, The Nobel Prize in Physics 2025, summary (October 2025)
  10. Associated Press (via KSAT), A list of this year's Nobel Prize winners (12 October 2026)
  11. Nobel Prize Outreach, Nobel Prize facts (27 October 2026)
  12. Al Jazeera (with AFP, Reuters, AP), Francis Halzen wins Nobel Prize in Physics for work on 'ghost particles' (October 2026)
  13. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2022 (2022)
  14. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2021 (2021)
  15. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2020 (2020)
  16. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2019 (2019)
  17. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2018 (2018)
  18. Nobel Prize Outreach, All Nobel Prizes 2017 (2017)
  19. Nobel Prize Outreach, The Nobel Prize in Physics 2016, summary (2016)