Nobel Prize for Physics Awarded to Scientists Who Made Startling Neutrino

Kajita described his work as demonstrating a new kind of physics beyond the Standard Model of fundamental particles, which requires for neutrinos to be massless.

Now, neutrinos are the second-most abundant particles in all of the cosmos around us.

It’s a matter of pride and excitement for Nova Scotians to learn that one of our own will share the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics for his work in revolutionizing our understanding of neutrinos, one of the fundamental – and most mysterious – particles that make up the universe.

For this year’s award the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited the researchers for discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass. Kajita showed in 1998 that the neutrinos created when powerful cosmic rays strike Earth’s atmosphere change flavors as they pass through the planet.

The research group in Canada led by Arthur B. McDonald demonstrated that the neutrinos from the sun were not disappearing on their way to Earth.

Dr. McDonald arrived at Queen’s in 1989, was the inaugural Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics and served as the director of SNO, now known as SNOLAB.

Disgorged by nuclear reactions in the sun, billions of neutrinos stream through us every day.

The findings solved a puzzle that physicists had wrestled with for decades, the academy added in its announcement.

Asked about impact of the discovery, McDonald said that if you don’t know whether neutrinos have mass, it is diffcult to understand how to incorporate them into basic theories of fundamental physics.

McDonald and Kajita’s work has proved that these particles change from one type to another when in transit from the sun to the earth.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has announced the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics on October 6.

In a statement on Tuesday, Principal Daniel Woolf said the prize reaffirmed the University’s status as a research-intensive institution, and congratulated McDonald for his “persistence, dedication and leadership”.

“Yes, there was that Eureka! moment”, he said.

In order to detect these quick moving, impossible to distinguish particles, giant tanks of purified water are built underground and on a rare occasion when a neutrino collides with an atoms nucleus, it produces a dim streak of light. But the numbers say that if they oscillate, they have mass. So something in the model is off.

McDonald said that scientists would still like to know the actual masses of the various forms of neutrino. In a news conference at the University of Tokyo, Kajita told the audience he wanted “to thank the neutrinos, of course”.

Half the prize went to Tu Youyou – the first-ever Chinese medicine laureate – who took inspiration from traditional medicine to produce artemesinin, a drug that is now the top treatment for malaria.

Other winners for chemistry, literature and peace categories will be announced later this week.