Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur B. McDonald of Canada won the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics this morning for their work showing that neutrinos, a few of the strangest particles we’ve ever discovered, actually have mass, despite their ghostly nature. Neutrinos are everywhere – second only to photons in terms of how common they are across the universe.
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Their existence was tentatively proposed in 1930, but was only proved in the 1950s, when nuclear reactors began to produce streams of the particles.
Kajita worked on spotting those so-called neutrino oscillations at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan, perhaps the best-named facility in all of science. It literally means “little neutral one” in Italian – denoting the fact that these particles do not possess any electrical charge and mass.
But when this figure was compared against actual measurements on Earth, an anomaly emerged.
For many years, the central enigma with neutrinos was that up to two-thirds fewer of them were detected on Earth than expected.
McDonald, too, had also announced the discovery of the electron-neutrino from the sun and how it changed states between muon and tau while they got closer to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, in Canada, back in 2001.
When Adam Smith of the official Nobel Prize website asked Kajita if he’d ever dreamed of this moment, he responded, “Well, of course, well, as really a dream, maybe years, but not serious dreaming so far”.
Michael S. Turner, a theoretical cosmologist at the University of Chicago, agreed that the Standard Model, a suite of equations that has dominated physics for the past half-century, was not complete. The Standard Model of physics-you know, the fundamental underpinnings of physics’ understanding of matter and its behavior-requires that neutrinos be massless. The scientists were honored for determining that the subatomic particles neutrinos do have mass.
The Nobel Committee said the discovery – arcane to nonscientists – has changed our understanding of matter, and may yet change our view of the universe, CNN reported.
The two men will share the prize of $1.2 million CAD equally.
And China’s Tu Youyou discovered a drug that has significantly reduced the mortality rates for patients suffering from malaria, so she will also share in the prize. “It’s kind of unbelievable”.
McDonald received the award – the highest honour for Physics awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences – along with Japanese scientist Takaaki Kajita.
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The prize committee announced the names of the winners on Tuesday. This new Nobel prize winning discovery may even play into improvements in the designs of fusion reactors as research in the field progresses.
