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.
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“New discoveries of the neutrino’s closely-guarded secrets are expected to change our understanding of the history, structure and future fate of the universe”, the Nobel group said in its statement.
Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Canada’s Arthur B. McDonald won the Nobel Physics Prize for work on neutrinos.
“Neutrinos contribute about as much to the mass budget of the universe as do stars!” he wrote in an e-mail. Using massive tanks of water and heavy water, located in a Japanese zinc mine and a Sudbury nickel mine to screen out interference from other radiation, they tracked neutrinos by detecting faint blue flashes of light given off when they collided with other particles.
Once thought to travel at the speed of light, they drift through the Earth and our own bodies like moonlight through a window.
Since the 1960s, scientists had estimated the number of neutrinos created in the nuclear reactions that make the Sun shine. The knowledge that neutrinos are capable of changing states, and that they have mass, will benefit astrophysicists and cosmologists in coming to grips with the evolution of the universe as well as solar fusion. Neutrinos are so small that about a billion neutrinos pass through a human thumb every second. Brown said it’s also a success for the theory known as quantum mechanics, which deals with fundamental particles and their interactions, because that’s the only way to explain how neutrinos can change from one type to another.
Kajita is Director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and Professor at University of Tokyo.
Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald were honored for showing that the particles, called neutrinos, spontaneously change from one type to another.
It’s really hard to pick who should get Nobel Prizes for work in physics.
From both discoveries, the phenomenon of the particle switch was dubbed “neutrino oscillation.” They also upended our current understanding and opened the door to a bunch of new questions, something physicists love. The Standard Model of physics-you know, the fundamental underpinnings of physics’ understanding of matter and its behavior-requires that neutrinos be massless.
William Campbell from Ireland and Satoshi Omura from Japan shared the prize for their discovery of a new therapy for infections caused by roundworm parasites.
McDonald, a Canadian citizen born in 1943, was awakened by the Nobel committee and asked to call in to the prize announcement in Stockholm.
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The laureates will receive their prizes at formal ceremonies in Stockholm on December 10, the anniversary of the 1896 death of prize creator Alfred Nobel, a Swedish philanthropist and scientist.
