TheWolf Prize in Physics is awarded once a year by theWolf Foundation inIsrael. It is one of the sixWolf Prizes established by the Foundation and awarded since 1978; the others are inAgriculture,Chemistry,Mathematics,Medicine andArts.
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]
| Year | Name | Nationality | Citation |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1978 | Chien-Shiung Wu |  United States / Republic of China | for her persistent and successful exploration of theweak interaction, which helped establish the precise form and thenon-conservation of parity for this natural force. |
| 1979 | George Eugene Uhlenbeck |  Netherlands / United States | for his discovery, jointly with the lateS. A. Goudsmit, of the electronspin. |
| Giuseppe Occhialini |  Italy | for his contributions to the discoveries ofelectron pair production andof the charged pion. | |
| 1980 | Michael E. Fisher |  United Kingdom | for pathbreaking developments culminating in the general theory of the critical behavior attransitions between the different thermodynamicphases of matter. |
| Leo P. Kadanoff | United States | ||
| Kenneth G. Wilson | |||
| 1981 | Freeman Dyson | United Kingdom / United States | for their outstanding contributions to theoretical physics, especially in the development and application of thequantum 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 ofquarks andleptons. |
| Martin Lewis Perl | |||
| 1983/84 | Erwin Hahn | United States | for his discovery of nuclearspin echoes and for the phenomenon of self-induced transparency. |
| Peter B. Hirsch | United Kingdom | for his development of the utilization of thetransmission 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 levelruby laser. | |
| 1985 | Conyers Herring | United States | for their major contributions to the fundamental theory of solids, especially of the behaviour of electrons in metals. |
| Philippe Nozieres |  France | ||
| 1986 | Mitchell J. Feigenbaum | United States | for his pioneering theoretical studies demonstrating the universal character ofnon-linear systems, which has made possible the systematic study ofchaos. |
| Albert J. Libchaber | France / United States | for his brilliant experimental demonstration of the transition toturbulence and chaos in dynamic systems. | |
| 1987 | Herbert Friedman | United States | for pioneering investigations in solarX-rays. |
| Bruno B. Rossi | Italy / United States | for the discovery ofextra-solar X-ray sources and the elucidation of their physical processes. | |
| Riccardo Giacconi | |||
| 1988 | Roger Penrose | United Kingdom | for their brilliant development of thetheory of general relativity, in which they have shown the necessity forcosmological singularities and have elucidated the physics ofblack holes. In this work they have greatly enlarged our understanding of theorigin and possiblefate of the Universe. |
| Stephen W. Hawking | |||
| 1989 | No award | ||
| 1990 | Pierre-Gilles de Gennes | France; | for a wide variety of pioneering contributions to our understanding of the organization of complexcondensed matter systems, de Gennes especially for his work onmacromolecular matter andliquid crystals and Thouless for his on disordered and low-dimensional systems. |
| 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 theweak interactions involving leptons. |
| Valentine L. Telegdi |  Hungary / Switzerland / United States | ||
| 1992 | Joseph H. Taylor, Jr. | United States | for his discovery of an orbitingradio 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 offractals 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 ofsuperconductivity and to the theory of high-energy processes in astrophysics. |
| Yoichiro Nambu |  Japan / United States | for his contribution to elementary particle theory, including recognition of the role played byspontaneous symmetry breaking in analogy with superconductivity theory, and the discovery of the color symmetry of thestrong interactions. | |
| 1995/96 | No award | ||
| 1996/97 | John Archibald Wheeler | United States | for his seminal contributions to black holes physics, toquantum gravity, and to the theories of nuclear scattering andnuclear fission. |
| 1998 | Yakir Aharonov |  Israel | for the discovery of quantum topological and geometrical phases. specifically theAharonov–Bohm effect, theBerry phase, and their incorporation into many fields of physics. |
| Michael V. Berry | United Kingdom | ||
| 1999 | Dan Shechtman | Israel | for the experimental discovery ofquasi-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 bydetection of neutrinos, thus creating the emerging field ofneutrino astronomy. |
| 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 andmacroscopic quantum phenomena; and Halperin on two- dimensional melting, disordered systems and strongly interacting electrons. |
| Anthony J. Leggett | United Kingdom / United States | ||
| 2004 | Robert Brout |  Belgium | for pioneering work that has led to the insight of mass generation whenever alocal gauge symmetry is realized asymmetrically in the world of sub-atomic particles. |
| François Englert | |||
| Peter W. Higgs | United Kingdom | ||
| 2005 | Daniel Kleppner | United States | for groundbreaking work in atomic physics of hydrogenic systems, including research on thehydrogen maser,Rydberg atoms andBose–Einstein condensation. |
| 2006/07 | Albert Fert | France | for their independent discovery of thegiant magnetoresistance phenomenon (GMR), thereby launching a new field of research and applications known asspintronics, which utilizes thespin of theelectron to store and transport information. |
| 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 oftests of Bell's inequalities, or extensions thereof, usingentangled quantum states. |
| Alain Aspect | France | ||
| Anton Zeilinger | Austria | ||
| 2011 | Maximilian Haider | Austria | for their development ofaberration-corrected electron microscopy, allowing the observation of individual atoms withpicometer precision, thus revolutionizingmaterials science. |
| Harald Rose | Germany | ||
| Knut Urban | |||
| 2012 | Jacob D. Bekenstein | Israel | for his work onblack holes.[4] |
| 2013 | Peter Zoller | Austria | for groundbreaking theoretical contributions toquantum information processing,quantum optics and the physics of quantum gases. |
| Ignacio Cirac |  Spain | ||
| 2014 | No award | ||
| 2015 | James D. Bjorken | United States | for predicting scaling indeep inelastic scattering, leading to identification of nucleon's pointlike constituents. He made a crucial contribution for elucidating the nature of thestrong force. |
| Robert P. Kirshner | United States | for creating the group, environment and directions that allowed his graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to uncoverthe acceleration in the expansion of the universe. | |
| 2016 | Yoseph Imry | Israel | for his work inmesoscopic 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 anextrasolar planet orbiting arounda star similar to the sun. |
| Didier Queloz | |||
| 2018 | Charles H. Bennett | United States | for their collaborative work in the rapidly expanding field ofquantum information science. |
| 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 andattosecond 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] |
| 2025 | James P. Eisenstein | United States | for advancing our understanding of the surprising properties of two-dimensional electron systems in strong magnetic fields.[9] |
| Mordehai Heiblum | Israel | ||
| Jainendra K. Jain |  India / United States |
Below is a chart of all laureates per country (updated to 2025 laureates). Some laureates are counted more than once if they have multiple citizenships.
| Country | Number of laureates |
|---|---|
| United States | 33 |
| United Kingdom | 10 |
| France | 7 |
| Israel | 6 |
| 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 |
| India | 1 |