Japanese, Canadian scientists win Nobel Prize for Physics

Goran K. Hansson (C), secretary-general of the Nobel Committee and Nobel Assembly, announces the winners of the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics in Stockholm, Sweden, October 6, 2015.

The awarding committee said the work of the trio – Isamu Akasaki, Hiroshi Amano and Shuji Nakamura – is in keeping with the spirit of Alfred Nobel, the founder of the prize, because LED lights save on energy, last long and are environmentally-friendly because they don’t contain mercury.

This discovery resolved the neutrino puzzle that had been troubling physicists for decades.

Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo and Arthur McDonald of Queen’s University in Canada will share the award for their experiments that show the invisible yet ubiquitous particles have mass. Since they could not be diverted by electromagnetic forces (being neutral) or by gravity (being thought at that time to have no mass), where were the missing solar neutrinos? This model considers neutrinos to have no mass but the prize-winning discovery demonstrates that this model is not the complete theory of the fundamental constituents of the universe. He said he is grateful to the neutrinos and their creators, the cosmic rays.

In fact, neutrons are so non-reactive that they pass straight through solid objects the size of planets. Trillions of them are constantly streaming through our bodies.

Meanwhile, in 1999, scientists led by McDonald at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, built deep under the ground in an old nickel mine in Ontario, Canada, were also studying neutrinos coming from the Sunday.

“The discovery rewarded with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics have yielded crucial insights into the all but hidden world of neutrinos”, the statement adds.

In a telephone interview after the announcement, McDonald said getting this phone call at 4 a.m.in the morning was a “very daunting experience”.

1956: Two American scientists, Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, report the first hard evidence of the existence of neutrinos. McDonald, 72, is a professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada.

Michael Turner, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, tells Here & Now’s Jeremy Hobson how this discovery has changed scientists’ understanding of the universe.

(Reuters) “The universe where we live in is still full of unknowns”.

Although they are hard to detect, neutrinos are extremely common, second only to photons (particles of light) as the most abundant species in space. Therefore, the experiments by Kajita and McDonald also uncovered neutrinos’ slight mass.

McDonald and Kajita will be awarded a diploma and gold medal on December. 10, and will split a prize of approximately $960,000.

Kajita showed in 1998 that neutrinos captured at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan underwent a metamorphosis in the atmosphere.

Tomorrow (Oct. 7), the Nobel Prize in chemistry will be announced.