A Canadian has been recognized for his outstanding work and will be honoured with the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2015. In their separate experiments, Kajita and McDonald each showed that neutrinos change between certain flavors – a process called neutrino oscillation.
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McDonald’s research was conducted at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO, or SNOLAB), where McDonald serves as Director. However, this has been extremely hard to observe because, despite being one of the most abundant particles in the universe, neutrinos hardly interact with matter.
For many years, the central enigma with neutrinos was that up to two-thirds fewer of them were detected on Earth than expected.
The prevailing theory was that neutrinos were massless, but experiments carried out separately by teams led by Kajita in Japan and McDonald in Canada showed that this was not the case. This is a discovery which prove that even these exotic, infinitesimally small particles still have a measureable amount of mass to them.
Kajita and McDonald will equally split the monetary prize of 8 million Swedish krona. But it is now clear that the model does not provide a complete picture of how the fundamental constituents of the universe function. Since they could not be diverted by electromagnetic forces (being neutral) or by gravity (being thought at that time to have no mass), where were the missing solar neutrinos?
Expect to hear more about neutrinos over the next few years. Neutrinos of three types; electron neutrino, muon neutrino, and tau neutrino.
Kajita is the eleventh Japanese Nobel Prize victor in Physics, following the most recent winners: Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura, who shared the prize in 2014.
Neutrinos are minuscule particles created in nuclear reactions, such as in the sun and the stars.
McDonald of Queen’s University in Canada and Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo were awarded Nobel Prize for making a groundbreaking discovery in physics. And because of other math, if neutrinos can do that, they have to have mass.
“It changes our understanding of the fundamentals of particle physics, and particles make up everything in the universe”, said Robert G.W. Brown, chief executive officer of the American Institute of Physics. In fact, billions of neutrinos are passing through your body as you read this.
He is the director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at the University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan.
The finding that they transform themselves has “changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter”, said the academy.
Kajita, like most Nobel Prize winners, was surprised to get the call this morning letting him know of his achievement.
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Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel created the prizes in 1895 to honor work in physics, chemistry, literature and peace.
