2013 Nobel Prize Betting Odds: Higgs Boson Discovery Favored For Physics, But Who Will Get The Award?

The announcement schedule for the 2013 Nobel Prizes has been released and bookmakers are taking bets on the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature and the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize. While there are no odds for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, many believe individuals involved with the Higgs boson will win, but questions remain about specifically who will receive the award.

The 2013 Nobel Prizes will be announced starting next week, beginning with Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine on Oct. 7. The Nobel Prize in Physics will be announced on Oct. 8 and the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize will be named on Oct. 11. There is no scheduled announcement date for the Nobel Prize in Literature, but the Guardian expects the prize to be awarded sometime next week as it is typically announced a week before the Man Booker Prize, the U.K.'s contemporary fiction award, which is scheduled for Oct. 15.

Bookmaker Paddy Power has set up betting lines for the literature prize and the peace prize, while Ladbrokes has set up a line for the literature prize alone. For the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature, Paddy Power and Ladbrokes have Japanese author Haruki Murakami favored at 3/1 odds. Paddy Power has Irish novelist William Trevor and Algerian author Assia Djebar, pen-name of Fatima-Zohra Imalayen, at 10/1 odds, while Ladbrokes has Joyce Carol Oates pegged at 6/1 odds. "Harry Potter" author J.K. Rowling and "50 Shades of Grey" author E.L. James have odds of 500/1 on Paddy Power.

For the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize, Malala Yousafzai is favored at 2/1 odds, followed by Denis Mukwege (6/4) and Bradley Manning (16/1).

Yousafzai, 16, survived an assassination attempt following her public stance on educating girls in Pakistan, and Mukwege is a Congolese gynecologist whose work with females who have been gang-raped has been internationally recognized. Mukwege returned to the Democratic Republic of Congo in January after surviving an assassination attempt. Manning is the former American soldier who was found guilty of releasing U.S. military and government restricted and classified documents; he is serving a sentence of 35 years in jail.

While no betting lines have been placed for the 2013 Nobel Prize in Physics, many believe the award will go to researchers studying the Higgs boson, a newly found elementary particle. The top contenders are theoretical physicists Peter Higgs, professor emeritus and the University of Edinburgh, and Francois Englert, professor emeritus at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles. But, as NBC News notes, there are thousands of people who have worked on the Higgs boson. Among them, theoretical physicists Tom Kibble (U.K.), Gerald Guralnik (U.S.) and C. R. Hagen (U.S.). Then, there are the researchers involved with the Large Hadron Collider's confirmation of the existence of the Higgs boson. One expert believes the prize should be awarded to Higgs, Englert and CERN, the European nuclear research lab that operates the LHC. Another expert believes CERN and members involved in the ATLAS and CMS experiments, which involve 2000 physicists in 35 countries, should be recognized for discovering the Higgs boson.