This is Nobel week and prize handouts start today with Medicine. Tomorrow is Physics, and Chemistry is on Wednesday. All others are political prizes of no interest here.
The physics prize should be awarded for the Higgs Boson and most likely Higgs himself and Englert will get it, but a third share may go to some other wildcard person or organisation. This will be decided by a vote at TRF but I can also remind you that a similar vote has been running for some time on viXra which has already been used to elect two winners of the much larger Fundamental Physics Prize.
Update 8-Oct-2013: Congratulations to James E. Rothman, Randy W. Schekman and Thomas C. Südhof who won the Physiology or Medicine prize “for their discoveries of machinery regulating vesicle traffic, a major transport system in our cells”.
Today will be the turn of the physics prize and it this point it may be worth hedging bets by noting that this might not even be given for the Higgs. Each year the Nobel committee has a big pile of worthy nominations and they may just decide that one of them fits better. However the chances for Higgs seem slightly better than even.
Some people are suggesting that the third share for the Higgs could go to CERN. The committee have hinted that an organisation is not ruled out even though they have never used that option before, but I think CERN would be a mistake. This is because many people in the CMS and ATLAS collaborations are not strictly speaking part of CERN. You could justify that CERN played a deserving role but to then leave out the physicists who actually made the discovery would be a new kind of mistake for the Nobel committee to make. Lumping CMS and ATLAS together as one also seems a bit forced but they could give it to Higgs, CMS and ATLAS leaving out Englert. That is more like the kind of mistake they have made before. I favour the option of reserving the prize for the theorists. If they start giving it to big organisations then they will also have to look at many other big collaborations in the future and they probably dont want to set a precedent that could radically change the nature of the award.