Nobel Prize

We have been very fortunate to have current and former faculty, former employees, and alumni of our program honored by being awarded a Nobel Prize. Below is a list of many of our celebrated physicists.

  • 2020 – Andrea Ghez ’87 (co-recipient with Reinhard Genzel) “for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our galaxy.”
  • 2017 – Rainer Weiss ’55 PhD ’62, Professor of Physics, Emeritus (2001–present) (co-recipient with Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne) “for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves.”
  • 2011 – Adam G. Riess ’92 (co-recipient with Saul Perlmutter and Brian P. Schmidt) “for the discovery of the accelerating expansion of the Universe through observations of distant supernovae.”
  • 2006 – George Smoot ’66, PhD ’71 (co-recipient with John C. Mather) “for their discovery of the blackbody form and anisotropy of the cosmic microwave background radiation.”
  • 2004 – Frank Wilczek, Herman Feshbach Professor of Physics (co-recipient with David J. Gross and H. David Politzer “for the discovery of asymptotic freedom in the theory of the strong interaction.”
  • 2001 – Eric A. Cornell PhD ’90, Wolfgang Ketterle, John D. MacArthur Professor of Physics, and Carl E. Wieman ’73 “for the achievement of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute gases of alkali atoms, and for early fundamental studies of the properties of the condensates.”
  • 1998 – Robert B. Laughlin PhD ’79 (co-recipient with Horst L. Störmer and Daniel C. Tsui) “for their discovery of a new form of quantum fluid with fractionally charged excitations.”
  • 1997 – William D. Phillips ’76 (co-recipient with Steven Chu, Claude Cohen-Tannoudji) “for development of methods to cool and trap atoms with laser light.”
  • 1994 – Clifford G. Shull, former Professor of Physics Emeritus (1986–2001) (co-recipient with Bertram N. Brockhouse) “for the development of the neutron diffraction technique.”
  • 1990 – Jerome I. Friedman, Professor of Physics Emeritus and former Physics Department Head (1983-1988), and Henry W. Kendall, former Julius A. Stratton Professor of Physics (co-recipient with Richard E. Taylor) “for their pioneering investigations concerning deep inelastic scattering of electrons on protons and bound neutrons, which have been of essential importance for the development of the quark model in particle physics.”
  • 1989 – Sidney Altman ’60 (co-recipient with Thomas R. Cech, a former MIT Biology postdoc) in Chemistry for the “discovery of catalytic properties of RNA.”
  • 1989 – Norman. F. Ramsey, former Radiation Laboratory employee (co-recipient with Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul), “for the invention of the separated oscillatory fields method and its use in the hydrogen maser and other atomic clocks”, the other half jointly to Hans G. Dehmelt and Wolfgang Paul “for the development of the ion trap technique.”
  • 1988 – Jack Steinberger, a researcher with the Radiation Laboratory’s antenna group (co-recipient with Leon M. Lederman and Melvin Schwartz) “for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino.”
  • 1979 – Steven Weinberg, former Professor of Physics (1969-1973), (co-recipient with Sheldon Lee Glashow and Abdus Salam) “for their contributions to the theory of the unified weak and electromagnetic interaction between elementary particles, including, inter alia, the prediction of the weak neutral current.”
  • 1977 – John Hasbrouck Van Vleck, former Rad Lab employee, (co-recipient with Philip W. Anderson and Sir Nevill Mott) “for their fundamental theoretical investigations of the electronic structure of magnetic and disordered systems.”
  • 1976 – Burton Richter ’52 PhD ’56 and Samuel Chao Chung Ting, Thomas Dudley Cabot Institute Professor of Physics, “for their pioneering work in the discovery of a heavy elementary particle of a new kind.”
  • 1972 – John Robert Schrieffer ‘ 53 (co-recipient with John Bardeen and Leon Neil Cooper) “for their jointly developed theory of superconductivity, usually called the BCS-theory.”
  • 1969 – Murray Gell-Mann PhD ’51 “for his contributions and discoveries concerning the classification of elementary particles and their interactions.”
  • 1968 – Luis W. Alvarez, former Radiation Laboratory employee, “for his decisive contributions to elementary particle physics, in particular the discovery of a large number of resonance states, made possible through his development of the technique of using hydrogen bubble chamber and data analysis.”
  • 1967 – Hans Albrecht Bethe, former Radiation Laboratory employee, “for his contributions to the theory of nuclear reactions, especially his discoveries concerning the energy production in stars.”
  • 1965 – Richard P. Feynman ’39 (co-recipient with Sin-Itiro Tomonaga and Julian Schwinger (former Rad Lab employee)) “for their fundamental work in quantum electrodynamics, with deep-ploughing consequences for the physics of elementary particles.”
  • 1964 – Charles Hard Townes, former Provost and Professor of Physics (1961–1966), (co-recipient with Nicolay Gennadiyevich Basov and Aleksandr Mikhailovich Prokhorov) “for fundamental work in the field of quantum electronics, which has led to the construction of oscillators and amplifiers based on the maser-laser principle.”
  • 1956 – William Bradford Shockley PhD ’36 (co-recipient with John Bardeen and Walter Houser Brattain) “for their researches on semiconductors and their discovery of the transistor effect.”
  • 1952 – E. M. Purcell, former Radiation Laboratory employee, (co-recipient with Felix Bloch) “for their development of new methods for nuclear magnetic precision measurements and discoveries in connection therewith.”
  • 1951 – Edwin M. McMillan, former Radiation Laboratory employee, (co-recipient of Nobel Prize in Chemistry with Glenn Theodore Seaborg) “for their discoveries in the chemistry of the transuranium elements.”
  • 1944 – I.I. Rabi, former Radiation Laboratory employee, “for his resonance method for recording the magnetic properties of atomic nuclei.”