Today the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics was announced

This year's Nobel season opened with the Nobel Prize in Biomedicine on October 5, awarded to three scientists Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel for their research on optogenetics - a powerful method that contributes to clarifying how neurons shape memories, emotions and behavior right in the active brain.

After Biomedicine, the Nobel Prizes in Physics, Chemistry, Literature, Peace and Economics were respectively announced on October 6 to 12.

In 2025, the Physics Prize will be named by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences named after Professor John Clarke (University of California Berkeley), Professor Michel H. Devoret (Yale University and University of California Santa Barbara), Professor John M. Martinis (University of California Santa Barbara) for their discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in electric circuits. "It is wonderful to be able to celebrate the way quantum mechanics continues to bring new surprises even after a century of existence. It is also extremely useful, because quantum mechanics is the foundation of all digital technologies," Olle Eriksson, President of the Nobel Assembly for Physics, said when announcing the prize.

In 2024, the Nobel Prize in Physics was announced by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in the name of Professor John J. Hopfield at Princeton University, USA and Professor Geoffrey E. Hinton at the University of Toronto, Canada for their fundamental discoveries and inventions that pave the way for machine learning with artificial neural networks.

The Nobel is an international award established by the Nobel Foundation in Stockholm in 1901 based on the assets of Alfred Nobel, a Swedish inventor and businessman. The prize is awarded annually to individuals and organizations with outstanding contributions in the fields of Biomedicine, Chemistry, Physics, Literature, and Peace. In 1968, the Central Bank of Sweden established the Bank of Sweden Prize for Economic Sciences in Memory of Nobel, also known as the Nobel Prize in Economics.

The winner will receive a medal, a personal certificate and a fixed amount of money. This year, the prize money for each category is 12 million Swedish kronor (about 1.27 million USD), an increase of 1 million kronor compared to last year.

From 1901 to 2025, 119 Nobel Prizes in Physics were awarded to 230 scholars. John Bardeen is the only person to receive the Nobel Prize in Physics twice, in 1956 and 1972. To date, the youngest person to ever receive the Nobel Prize in Physics is Lawrence Bragg, who was awarded the prize at the age of 25 along with his father in 1915.