Nobel Thoughts for 2026
The Nobel prize for Physics will be awarded on October 6 this year. This post is about some possible candidates. Speculation on this count is a favorite activity in the physics community and entirely sanctioned by the culture of science -:).
I claim no special expertise in making such forcasts, but I did become a minor celebrity among my friends for predicting Alain Aspect's prize in 2022 (full declaration: this was not very hard to do, for anyone in the field).
Michael Berry and Yakir Aharonov: Michael Berry was probably the first person to generally introduce the concept of a geometrical phase (before him Pancharatnam and Longuet-Higgins discovered specific realizations in optics and molecular physics). This is a phase picked up by the quantum mechanical wavefunction as a parameter is gradually changed in the system. The textbook example is of the Berry phase picked up by an electron in a magnetic fied whose direction is varied slowly.
The Berry phase is very important across many fields in physics. Some compelling examples are adiabatic quantum computing, where the phase is exploited to make logic gates; topological materials, whose unique properties are characterized by the Berry phase; and the quantum Hall effect, which requires the Berry phase for foundational understanding.
Yakir Aharanov (along with David Bohm) identified a Berry phase which is picked up by an electron even when it does not see a magnetic (or electric field); in this case the magnetic field is confined inside a coil. The phase arises from the (vector) potential corresponding to the magnetic field. This was a fundamental discovery, showing that while in classical mechanics potentials are mathematical tools, in quantum physics they are measurable.
Allan MacDonald, Rafi Bistritzer and Pablo Jarillo-Herrero: The first two theoretically predicted that rotating two stacked layers of graphene at the 'magic angle' of 1.1 degrees would transform the material from an insulator to a superconductor. Jarillo-Herrero did the experiment.
Magic angle bilayer graphene ('twistronics'), although it displays superconductivity only at low temperatures, is being intensely investigated by physicists as it is an extremely clean (no doping, only two atomic layers, etc.) system which is likely to give hints about how to make more complicated superconductors work at room temperature. While the discovery has provided a fertile quantum simulator, there have yet to be any commercial applications.
John Pendry and Ulf Leonhart: These two pioneered the development of metamaterials, i.e. materials with properties not normally found in nature. Victor Veselago's name is usually taken as well, but he passed away a few years ago, and is thus ineligible for the Nobel. Metamaterials help make invisibility cloaks, near-perfect lenses, and stronger mechanical structures.
Hitoshi Katori and Jun Ye: These two invented and developed the optical lattice clock. Such atomic clocks are incredibly precise - they lose less than 1 second over 15 billion years (the age of the universe).
Measuring time well allows us to transfer that ability to measure other things (such as space or force) well. These clocks have improved GPS location and deep-space communication, and enabled searches for the variation of fundamental constants of nature with time.
Juan Cirac, Peter Zoller and Peter Shor: Shor showed quantum computers can greatly outperform classical machines. Cirac and Zoller proposed the ion trap realization of a quantum computer. Together their discoveries unleashed a revolution in quantum computing.
While small and rudimentary quantum computers have been realized, they are not yet big and effective enough to demonstrate quantum advantage unambiguously. Thus, in my humble opinion the Nobel might be a little premature this year. But surely soon.
Needless to say, these candidates have been recognized by various other prestigious prizes already - e.g. the Wolf Prize, the Kavli Prize in Nanoscience, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, etc.
Afterword: Next post - the list for Chemistry!
