Arthur B. McDonald, Takaaki Kajita Awarded Nobel Prize in Physics

It’s as if a duck could change itself into a goose and then a swan and back into a duck again.

Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald’s breakthrough was the discovery of a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation that has upended scientific thinking and promises to change understanding about the history and future fate of the cosmos. Neutrinos were observed for the first time in 1954 as they were produced in a nuclear reactor. In spite of a flux of about 100,000 trillion solar neutrinos per second, neutrinos interact so rarely that he expected to see only about a couple dozen argon atoms after a week’s running.

Monday: William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the Nobel Prize Physiology or Medicine, for discoveries concerning the treatment of infections caused by roundworm parasites, jointly (half and half) with Youyou Tu, for discoveries concerning “a novel therapy against malaria”.

After photons, neutrinos are the particles that are most available in the universe.

“At the same time that we found a fundamental property of neutrinos, we verified that our model of the Sun was very accurate”, he said. Their detectors are sometimes submerged in huge water tanks to shield against the radioactive decay of surrounding rock. A handful of top goals came out of the process, including “Execute a program with the U.S.as host that provides precision tests of the neutrino sector with an underground detector”. Those features are different, though often conflated (don’t take advice about neutrinos from a poet, even it is John Updike). The evidence for neutrino oscillations came from the experiment’s ability to detect energetic neutrinos produced in Earth’s atmosphere. This phenomenon is known as neutrino oscillation.

Around the turn of the millennium, Kajita and McDonald, using different experiments, managed to explain this by showing that neutrinos actually changed identities, or “flavours”, and therefore must have a few mass, however small.

RAY VOLKAS: Well the precise mechanism by which neutrinos would gain mass, so you can just put mass by hand into the theory, there has to be a mechanism by which they get mass. That mechanism is unknown, and it can have all sorts of implications depending upon what it exactly is and there are many possibilities.

Kajita headed a team working at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan.

“Having two faculty members who have a direct connection to the recipients of a Nobel Prize in physics is quite unique for a physics department of our size”, said Tina Keller, director of physics, professor and associate dean in the College of Arts & Sciences at United States dollars. For a long time, physicists had convinced themselves – based on the predictions of the Standard Model that describes particles and their interactions – that neutrinos should be massless particles. To understand the phenomenon in greater detail, physicists are now generating beams of neutrinos at many sites over the world, including Fermilab, Brookhaven, CERN and the KEK laboratory in Japan.

“This was a big shock because he proved in a statistically significant manner… that neutrinos oscillate”, said Ereditato.

One of the most promising ideas ties the oscillation of neutrinos with the fact that our universe exists at all. Neutrinos are fundamental particles. We don’t even know which species is the heaviest and which is the lightest. This suggested that electron neutrinos can, in fact, oscillate into other neutrinos. We call the matter we don’t see dark matter. “I’m still so shocked I don’t really know what to say”, a grinning Kajita told a packed news conference in Tokyo.