The size of the Nobel Prize depends on the foundation's income, ranging from approximately ￡11,000 ($31,000) to ￡30,000 ($72,000).

The face value of the bonus has increased year by year due to inflation. It was initially about more than 30,000 US dollars, in the 1960s it was 75,000 US dollars, and in the 1980s it reached more than 220,000 US dollars.

The Nobel Prize prize is always awarded in Swedish currency, Swedish kronor. The amount of the annual prize depends on the investment income of the Nobel Fund. When the Nobel Prize was awarded for the first time in 1901, the prize for each individual award was 150,000 Swedish kronor.

, which was equivalent to the salary of a professor in Sweden who worked for 20 years.

The gold medal weighs about half a pound and contains 23K gold. The diameter of the medal is about 6.5 centimeters and there is a relief of Nobel on the front.

Different awards and medals have different decorations on the back.

The design of each award certificate also has its own unique style.

On October 13, 1998, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced that the 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Robert B. Laughlin (1950--) of Stanford University in California, USA, and to Columbia University in New York and Bell Labs in New Jersey.

Horst L. Stormer (1949--) and Daniel C. Tsui (1939--) of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Princeton University, New Jersey, USA, for their discovery of a new type of fractional charge excited state.

This state results from the so-called fractional quantum Hall effect.