Prominent Italian physicist Nicola Cabibbo, an expert in particle interaction who many said should have shared a Nobel prize in 2008, died Monday aged 75, the ANSA news agency reported.

He had been admitted earlier in the day to a Rome hospital with respiratory problems, the agency added.

An American and two Japanese scientists – Yoichiro Nambu, Makoto Kobayashi and Toshihide Maskawa – won the 2008 Nobel prize for physics for work based on an idea spawned by Prof. Cabibbo, a professor at the University of Rome.

The three laureates were lauded for their efforts to explain concepts of the nature of matter and the origins of the Universe, created in the Big Bang some 14 billion years ago.

Roberto Petronzio, president of the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics, said after the 2008 Nobel prize award: “Prof. Cabibbo was the first to understand the mechanism of the phenomenon of quarks” that was developed by the laureates.

“I cannot hide our bitterness because Kobayashi and Maskawa have the sole merit of having generalised a central idea that Prof. Cabibbo fathered,” he said.

Each Nobel prize is limited to a maximum of three recipients.