Kajita described his work as demonstrating a new kind of physics beyond the Standard Model of fundamental particles, which requires for neutrinos to be massless. The neutrino had always been assumed to have no mass, so this one of those discoveries that’s going to change how we see the universe.
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Next to particles of light called photons, they are the most abundant particles in the Universe.
The prize was awarded to Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada, who made key contributions to experiments showing that neutrinos change identities.
In the announcement, the Royal Swedish Academy of the Sciences stated that the pair’s research has spurred “intense activity” on the subject, which is “expected to change our current understanding of the history, structure and future fate of the universe”. (Alongside Masatoshi Koshiba of the University of Tokyo, Raymond Davis, who led the Homestake experiment, later shared half of the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for developing techniques to detect such neutrinos from space).
Of course, they also already know that neutrinos only very rarely actually interact with matter as they can easily slip directly through an entire block of lead the length of an entire light-year!
Around the turn of the millennium, Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan. In addition to being produced by cosmic rays and the sun and other stars, many neutrinos were created in the Big Bang.
“If we don’t figure out what they’re doing or how they behave, our grandchildren won’t have the information to assemble a more useful picture”, he said.
One of the great unsolved mysteries of physics is that current science can account for just 5% or so of the mass of the universe.
With his wife listening on the extension, the 72-year-old Queen’s University professor spoke to several members of the committee about physics, and then about the Toronto Maple Leafs.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that pass through matter with minimal interaction.
According to quantum mechanics, particles, including neutrinos, can also be thought of as waves, and the frequency of these waves depends on the particles’ masses. About 1 kilometer Super-Kamioka neutrino Zealand Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada and a research center established in a zinc mine near Tokyol in Japan famous for its success in working on this issue. He noticed in 1998 that more muon neutrinos were detected coming in directly from the atmosphere than from below, passing through the Earth.
“When you do not know whether they have mass, it’s otherwise hard to understand how to incorporate them into those theories that give us a more complete understanding of the world of physics at the most fundamental level”.
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Kajita and McDonald will receive the prize at a ceremony in Stockholm on December. 10, sharing the prize money of 8 million Swedish kroner (about $960,000).
