The Dirac Medal to Nicola Cabibbo
The 2010 Dirac Medal and Prize are awarded to Nicola Cabibbo (University La Sapienza, Rome, Italy) and Ennackal Chandy George Sudarshan (University of Texas, Austin, Texas, USA) in recognition of their fundamental contributions to the understanding of weak interactions and other aspects of theoretical physics.
Cabibbo's important contributions to theoretical physics include the recognition of the significance of mixing in weak interactions, which has established the existence of a new class of physical constants, whose first example is the Cabibbo angle. This angle determines the mixing of strange quarks with non-strange quarks and has been measured experimentally. With the discovery of a third family of quarks and leptons, quark mixing led to the understanding of the phenomenon of CP violation.