Canada’s Arthur McDonald and Takaaki Kajita of Japan have won the Nobel Prize in physics for their work discovering neutrino oscillations.
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“The discovery that neutrinos have mass has profound consequences, not only for particle physics, pointing at physics beyond the Standard Model, but also for astrophysics and cosmology”, says Botner, who is the spokesperson for the IceCube neutrino experiment at the South Pole.
McDonald told reporters in Stockholm by phone that the discovery helped scientists fit neutrinos into theories of fundamental physics. “This is really one of the milestones in our understanding of nature”. The rest consists of so-called dark matter and dark energy, which scientists can not yet explain.
The ability to swap flavors is evidence that neutrinos do in fact have mass – minuscule, to be sure, but present nonetheless. And because of other math, if neutrinos can do that, they have to have mass. But an experiment at the Homestake gold mine in South Dakota threw up a mystery: it detected fewer electron-type neutrinos streaming from the Sun than theorists had predicted. It had been believed since their discovery in the 1950s that they have no mass, making experiments involving them impossible. The committee reached both Kajita and McDonald early this morning to deliver the news of their award. The Americans that actually detected them found out three kinds namely; electron, muon neutrinos and tau.
Scientists know that neutrinos, at most, weigh two-billionths of a proton. “The shape and intensity of the Cherenkov light reveals what type of neutrino it is caused by, and from where it comes”, a background paper on the discovery reads.
Meanwhile, the research group in Canada led by McDonald could demonstrate that the neutrinos from the Sun were not disappearing on their way to Earth.
“That’s been a 40-year-old puzzle called the solar neutrino problem”, Neubauer said.
Doug Hallman’s habit of religiously checking the Nobel Prize website for the latest winners paid off Tuesday morning. But it is now clear that the model does not provide a complete picture of how the fundamental constituents of the universe function. Kajita and McDonald’s results show that a replacement is needed.
Why mines? The thousands of feet of rock act as a shield against cosmic radiation that would interfere with the scientists’ measurements deep underground.
After entering graduate school at the University of Tokyo, he joined the laboratory of Masatoshi Koshiba, professor emeritus at the university.
The first hint that neutrinos were stranger than expected came in the 1960s.
In 1998, Kajita, the director the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at the University of Tokyo, discovered that neutrinos which were caught in Japan’s Super-Kamiokande detector underwent a manner of metamorphosis.
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Asked at the press conference whom he would like thank for his achievements, Kajita replied, “I’d like to thank the neutrino of course”. The award ceremony will be held in Stockholm on December 10.
