The prestigious European Physical Society High Energy and Particle Physics Prize was awarded for 2007 to Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa for "the proposal of a successful mechanism for CP violation in the Standard Model, predicting the existence of a third family of quarks". Kobayashi is a professor emeritus of the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Japan, and the former Director of the Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies of KEK.
 
Kobayashi, together with Maskawa, proposed six types of quarks and their mixing matrix for the weak interaction in 1973. Later in 1995, the sixth quark was discovered, and in 2001, KEK and SLAC confirmed the CP violation using B mesons at their B-factory experiments Belle and BaBar.