Japanese physicist Maskawa Toshihide who won the Nobel Prize in 2008 has died of cancer at the age of 81.

Maskawa was born in the Japanese city of Nagoya in 1940.

He began to study elementary particles when he was a student at Nagoya University. The particles are a fundamental constituent of matter.

Maskawa and his colleague Kobayashi Makoto of Kyoto University won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physics for contributing to the advancement of particle physics with their work in predicting the existence of at least six kinds of elementary particles called quarks. At the time, only three kinds of quarks had been discovered. Their theory was later verified.

Maskawa had been a professor of Kyoto University until 2003. He later became a distinguished invited university professor of Nagoya University.

He had also served as the director of the Kobayashi-Maskawa Institute for the Origin of Particles and the Universe at Nagoya University.