Nobel Prizes are awarded each year in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature, peace, and economic sciences.
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The experiments, however, continue and intense activity is underway worldwide, including in India, in order to capture neutrinos and examine their properties.
What are they? Neutrinos are one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe, but they’re also among the least understood and for decades remained hypothetical.
He said Takaaki Kajita and his co-awardee Arthur McDonald discovered that neutrinos have tiny amount of mass, making that theory “very plausible”. But on Tuesday, two physicists won the Nobel Prize for proving that poem – and more than 50 years of scientific belief – to be wrong. Neutrinos come in three types, or “flavors”: electron, muon and tau. “This is really one of the milestones in our understanding of nature”. “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. A further Nobel Prize was presented to Ray Davis in 2002 for this discovery. “As it turns out I did not mind”, McDonald said about his pre-dawn wake-up call.
Now physicists know there are three flavors, or varieties, of neutrino. Kajita’s research group in Japan saw that neutrinos that were created in reactions between cosmic rays and the Earth’s atmosphere changed identities on their way to Kajita’s Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan. The Sun only produces electron-neutrinos.
A Queen’s University scientist with close ties to Ottawa has won a Nobel Prize in physics.
Under the quirky rules of quantum physics, the identity change can only happen if the neutrinos have mass.
The research, by Takaaki Kajita in Japan and Arthur McDonald in Canada at the start of the millennium, meant that this elusive particles could finally be placed within the known rules of physics.
Let’s back up here a moment and get a few background information out there: Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the universe.
The winners will share the 8 million Swedish kronor (about $960,000) prize money with one half going to Mr. McDonand and the other to Mr Kajita.
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“The Nobel Committee said the discovery – arcane to nonscientists – has changed our understanding of matter, and may yet change our view of the universe”.
