Physicists win Nobel for finding that neutrino particles, burdened with mass

Asman, a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, compared Takaaki Kajita’s and Arthur B. McDonald’s discovery that the neutrino particles can change identities to the groundbreaking discovery of the Higgs particle.

“Around the turn of the millennium, Takaaki Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan”, the academy’s press release said.

The revelation has changed the way science views the most intricate aspects of matter and the broader understanding of the universe, with the pairs’ contribution perfectly aligned with the categories’ parameters concerned with “changes in identity among a few of the most abundant inhabitants in the university”, according to a statement made by the awarding committee.

The award honors Kajita for his discovery “of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”.

The Nobel committee described both discoveries as being of “ground-breaking importance for particle physics and for our understanding of the universe”.

McDonald said that scientists would still like to know what the actual mass of the neutrino is.

Together their work overturned the prevailing theory that neutrinos have no mass, and has forced physicists to reconsider the fundamental make-up of the universe.

John Bardeen is the only person, who has won it twice, for his work in superconductivity and semiconductors.

“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”, he said.

Ereditato said the idea that neutrinos could transform from one type into another was first put forward in the late 1950s, but scientists’ understanding of the process was rather vague until Kajita’s announced his discovery in 1998.

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 miniscule particles created in nuclear reactions, such as in the sun and the stars, or in nuclear power plants. “Once again quantum mechanics and wave interference provided an explanation for oscillatory behavior – this time with mass and previously with photons”, Brown said. Neutrino’s come in three “flavors” (although they don’t carry a taste, just like Domino’s pizza) called electron, tau and muon. “What they are, no one really knows”. Besides, they have bagged the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this year for their discoveries. The Nobel Prize for Chemistry will be announced on Wednesday, Literature on Thursday, and the Peace Prize on Friday.

The prize for medicine was awarded on Monday to three scientists for their work in developing drugs to fight parasitic diseases including malaria and elephantiasis.