Coming at a time when they were facing trouble from the local population, the news about Nobel Prize for Physics going to scientists studying neutrinos have spread cheer among the experts here at the Institute of Mathematical Science, one of the institutes, involved in setting up the Indian Neutrino Observatory (INO) project near Madurai.
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He joined the University’s physics department to conduct research on particle physics.
Connor McDavid and other National Hockey League stars will continue to attract more attention, as will the top Canadian actors, musicians and other entertainers. It also says that there are three types (“flavors”) of neutrino, called electron, muon, and tau neutrinos. In the nineteen-eighties, my colleague Sheldon Glashow and I coined the phrase “just-so neutrino oscillations” to describe this process.
The breakthrough has shaken the previous Standard Model of particle physics and a decades-old physics puzzle. So where is neutrino research heading next – and what could it discover?
Leading a team comprising researchers from different nationalities and universities, Kajita steadily observed neutrinos falling from outer space at the Super-Kamiokande.
“The discovery changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe”, a press release from the academy stated.
RAY VOLKAS: Well the precise mechanism by which neutrinos would gain mass, so you can just put mass by hand into the theory, there has to be a mechanism by which they get mass. That mechanism is unknown, and it can have all sorts of implications depending upon what it exactly is and there are many possibilities.
In fact, we would be without virtually all of our modern conveniences were it not for the efforts of people with inquiring minds who pondered the world around them and figured out how things worked and how to use their discoveries for practical purposes. They can come from the cosmos, from Earth and from Earth’s atmosphere. This is called neutrino oscillations. They studied neutrinos from the sun, all of which start out as electron neutrinos, and showed that along the 150-million-kilometer trek to Earth, a few of those neutrinos change into muon and tau neutrinos. However, as always, these new insights led to further questions.
The prize went to Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich for chronicling the great tragedies of the Soviet Union and its successor states through the voices of female soldiers, survivors of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster and former Soviet citizens dejected by the collapse of communism. We have strong reasons to believe that in the Big Bang, matter and anti-matter were created in equal measure.
Kajita showed in the 1998 Super-Kamiokande experiment that neutrinos oscillate between the flavours. They were at different points in their oscillation cycles.
It’s a mystery why neutrinos are nearly, but not quite, massless. “We are very satisfied that we have been able to add to the world’s knowledge at a very fundamental level”, said McDonald.
McDonald said that scientists would still like to know the actual masses of the various forms of neutrino. It used a detector called the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) inside a mine in Sudbury, Canada, containing 1000 tons of heavy water.
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Because neutrinos interact so weakly, they can travel vast distances. In the standard model of particle physics, developed throughout the last fifty years of the twentieth century-the model which has correctly described every other observation that has been made in particle accelerators and other experiments, and which represents perhaps the greatest intellectual adventure that science has ever seen-neutrinos have to be massless.
