Here at Physics World we have had some luck with predicting who is going to win a Nobel Prize in Physics. One successful strategy is to identify top physicists and just keep predicting that they will win – and eventually they do!
For example, we picked Anton Zeilinger for the 2009, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2019 prizes – and he won in 2022. Clearly, it was a mistake to give up on him in 2020.
In making our predictions we sometimes rely on an infographic that we have been updating for a decade or so. It shows the chronological progression of Nobel prizes in terms of fields of endeavour – such as condensed matter, particle and nuclear, quantum and more (see figure).
By staring at the infographic for far too long, we have convinced ourselves that there is a regular pattern of gaps between prizes in specific fields. Looking that the latest version of the infographic it looks like both condensed matter physics, and particle and nuclear physics are due a prize.
I have really struggled to think of a particle and nuclear breakthrough that could bag the 2026 Nobel – but I believe I have come up with one or two contenders. One is a prize to physicists working on CERN’s ATHENA and ALPHA collaborations, who were the first to trap cold antihydrogen atoms and then study them in detail. One laureate would surely be the Denmark-based American physicist Jeffrey Hangst, who is a founder of both collaborations. Making extremely precise comparisons of the properties of antihydrogen and hydrogen could reveal why there appears to be much more matter than antimatter in the universe – an important mystery in physics.
But alas, these and other antimatter experiments have yet to find any significant deviations from the Standard Model description of antihydrogen, so that might preclude a Nobel prize for Hansgt and one or two of his colleagues. And another caveat is one could easily argue that many of the innovations at ATHENA and ALPHA are in the field of atomic and molecular physics, not particle and nuclear physics – so there would be much debate here at Physics World if we had to update our infographic with an antihydrogen prize.
Another potential prize in particle and nuclear physics is for the the creation of the quark–gluon plasma (QGP). This is a state of matter that occurs very briefly when large nuclei (such as lead or gold) are collided at high energies. The result is a soup of quarks and gluons that is though to resemble the early universe shortly after the Big Bang. Studying the QGP is a fascinating and important area of physics, but because the experimental work has been done by large collaborations at both CERN in Switzerland and at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the US it would be difficult to select just three people as Nobel winners. The fact that scientific breakthroughs in particle and nuclear physics are often made by large collaborations has led some to call for the three-person limit on prize winners to be lifted.
The field of condensed matter is much more fruitful when it comes to potential Nobel prizes. The analytics company Clarivate has released its “Citation laureates 2026 in physics” which predicts Nobel winners based on the citation impact of their published research. Clarivate (and its predecessor Thomson Reuters) has a reasonably good record of picking winners and this year all three of its predictions are in condensed matter physics.
Organic LEDs
One prediction is a prize to Chihaya Adachi, Stephen Forrest and Mark Thompson for work leading to the development of ultrahigh-efficiency organic light-emitting diodes. The second is to Nicola Spaldin for her theoretical work on room-temperature magnetoelectric multiferroics, which Clarivate says are enabling new energy-efficient device paradigms. The third prediction is to Awarded to Qikun Xue “for experimental observation of the quantum anomalous Hall Effect”. What all three of these awards have in common is a relatively immediate connection of the development of new technologies.
Spaldin was profiled in Physics World back in 2023 and she talks about the joy that she gets from her research, which combines blue-sky research with the design of real materials.
Other prestigious awards are also a good place to look for potential Nobel winners. The 2026 Kavli Prize in Nanoscience went to the physicists Eva Andrei, Pablo Jarillo-Herrero and Allan MacDonald for their pioneering work on twistronics. This is a burgeoning field that involves rotating the relative angle between two sheets of 2D material such as graphene. Rotations create moiré superlattices with a wide range of electronic properties including superconductivity.
I am also keen on an award for the applied physicist Federico Capasso. As well as developing a wide range of semiconductor technologies – including the quantum cascade laser – Capasso has done seminal work on optical metamaterials. An award for such metamaterials could be shared with John Pendry (a 2024 Kavli nanoscience laureate), who has developed a mathematical framework for designing optical metamaterials. These days prizes are usually awarded to trios, so potential partners for Capasso and Pendry are David Smith – a pioneer in creating metamaterials that operate at microwave frequencies – and Andrea Alù who is a prolific researcher in photonic metamaterials. Other possible winners in this field are Ulf Leohardt, Nader Engheta, George Eleftheriades and Vladimir Shalaev.
Wavelet theory
Finally, a potential prize that I find intriguing is inspired by “Clarivate’s Citation laureates 2025 in physics”. This proposes Ingrid Daubechies, Stéphane Mallat and Yves Meyer “for advancing wavelet theory, a revolution in mathematics and physics with practical applications including image processing”. Such an award would be difficult to shoehorn into a category in our infographic. I think applied physics would be the best fit.
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced on Tuesday, 6 October at 10:45 BST at the earliest.
