Symmetry factor

2006 Nobel Prize in physics will be awarded on Oct. 3 — just in a couple of days. Of course, there is already an active discussion in blogosphere about who should get it. In fact , Thompson Scientific (yes, publisher of our algebra-based General Physics textbook) has a poll with the following results:

49% - Desurvire, Nakazawa, Payne (condensed matter: fiber optics)
32% - Fert, Gruenberg (condensed matter: giant magnetoresistance)
20% - Guth, Linde, Steinhardt (cosmology: inflation)

Although I think that this year it’ll go to someone more “applied” (which would make contestant number 2 above the most likely candidate), I can suggest a couple of candidates in particle/nuclear physics:

• Makoto Kobayashi, Toshihide Maskawa, and maybe Nicola Cabibbo for mechanism of CP-violation in the Standard Model;

• Yoishiro Nambu and Jeffrey Goldstone for mechanism of spontaneous symmetry breaking;

• James Bjorken for scaling in QCD

Any other ideas?