Kajita is Director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and Professor at University of Tokyo.
Advertisement
McDonald said that scientists would still like to know what the actual mass of the neutrino is.
Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada have been awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for their discovery that the subatomic particles called neutrinos do have mass. Scientists have called this a historic and major discovery.
So besides revealing solar processes, neutrinos are a crucial part of any model of the basic particles of the universe and the forces through which they interact.
“It has become obvious that the Standard Model cannot be the complete theory of how the fundamental constituents of the Universe function”. Most that reach Earth from elsewhere were created by nuclear reactions inside the Sunday.
“A decisive piece of the puzzle fell in place when Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, SNO, performed their measurements of neutrinos arriving from the Sun”, the Committee said.
Trillions pass through us and the Earth every second but leave no evidence of their passing.
According to the announcement on the Nobel Prize website, McDonald and Kajita were awarded the prize for their “discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”.
In an interview with CBC Cape Breton’s Information Morning for its 2011 series, Leaders in their Fields, McDonald said studying the very small has provided huge amounts of information to science.
“Yes, there was that Eureka! moment”, he said.
The two scientists worked separately.
Three years later, while working at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, McDonald found that neutrinos coming from the sun also switched identities.
The Nobel organization said the recent discovery of neutrino’s capability to change states will greatly impact man’s understanding of matter and the universe as a whole.
Although they are hard to detect, neutrinos are extremely common, second only to photons (particles of light) as the most abundant species in space.
Physicists had known about neutrinos for decades. Neutrinos of three types; electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino. They also receive a medal and a Nobel “diploma”.
Other winners for chemistry, literature and peace categories will be announced later this week.
The prize will be awarded in Stockholm on December 10 to Arthur B. McDonald, who led the project in the nickel mine, and Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo, who led experiments in a Japanese zinc mine.
Advertisement
On Monday, Tu Youyou of China, Irish-born American William Campbell, and Japan’s Satoshi Omura won the Nobel Medicine Prize for unlocking revolutionary treatments for malaria and roundworm, diseases that blight millions of lives.
