The discoveries about neutrinos could possibly change our perception about the universe’s structure, its history and its future fate.
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“Yes, there certainly was a Eureka moment in this experiment when we were able to see that neutrinos appeared to change from one type to the other in traveling from the Sun to the Earth,” McDonald told reporters by telephone from his home in Kingston. The prevailing theory was that neutrinos were massless, but experiments carried out separately in underground labs by teams led by Kajita in Japan and McDonald in Canada showed that this was not the case.
Scientists at the India-based Neutrino Observatory (INO) were celebrating on Tuesday after the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics went to two scientists for their work in the field of neutrinos. The Americans that actually detected them found out three kinds namely; electron, muon neutrinos and tau.
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.
The Academy’s statement also noted that this discovery, which proves that neutrinos hold mass, has solved a mystery that physicists have grappled with for decades.
It is the second most common substance in the Universe and yet for the past 65 years since it was discovered, the neutrino sub-atomic particle has proven to be remarkably elusive.
How many types of neutrinos are they? The sun was thought to produce electron neutrinos only, and if these particles were somehow morphing into the other two flavours as they travelled through space, it could explain the anomaly.
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. Trillions of them are constantly streaming through our bodies. And this was a historic discovery for particle physics.
Takaaki Kajita, director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at the University of Tokyo, shared the €857,000 prize with Arthur McDonald, professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Canada.
“It has become obvious that the Standard Model can not be the complete theory of how the fundamental constituents of the universe function”, said the Nobel statement.
Yesterday, the Nobel Foundation announced the Prize in physiology or medicine to a trio of scientists for discovering novel treatments for parasitic infections. They also receive a medal and a Nobel “diploma”.
The prize announcements continue with chemistry on Wednesday, literature on Thursday, the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday and the economics award next Monday.
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“Reuters put this (project) on the list of possible Nobel Prize winners back in 2007, so it’s something that the (academic) community has been speaking about for quite a few years”, he said.
