Former physics professor receives Nobel Prize

Neutrinos are very weird particles. In fact, billions of neutrinos are passing through your body right now. There is a lot about physical reality that goes undetected by our senses.

The neutrinos, produced by nuclear fusion in the sun, are able to pass through most matter with very little interaction, making detection tricky.

Neutrinos are the second most abundant particles in the universe after photons, “so any property of neutrinos can have dramatic repercussions on the life of the universe and on its evolution”, he said. If this is correct, we could end up with two versions of neutrinos (on top of the particle-anti-particle duality): one that has the tiny mass we observe today and an extremely heavy one, that was abundantly present when the universe was first born.

Accordingly, Fermilab, America’s premier particle physics laboratory, has launched a multi-decade effort to build the world’s most intense beam of neutrinos, aimed at a distant detector located 800 miles away in South Dakota.

Neutrinos were only detected in 1956 by Americans Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, who used a fission reactor as a source.

The nuclear reactions in the Sun produce neutrinos of one flavor, electron. The neutrinos involved in Pauli’s proposal were electron neutrinos, associated with processes that include electrons. The 2015 prize was awarded to Takaaki Kajita of the Super-Kamiokande Experiment and Arthur McDonald of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”. The new neutrino became known as the muon neutrino.

The Nobel Prize in physics was awarded to two researchers.

While particle detectors were deciphering the unusual behavior of the three neutrinos, mystery was collecting in the heavens.

In 1970, chemist Ray Davis built a large experiment created to detect neutrinos from the Sunday. To their dismay, the numbers collected amounted to one-third of what Bahcall had predicted.

Ask a member of the public what a neutrino is or what they’re good for, and you’ll probably get a blank stare. He stood by his experiment as others tried to replicate his results or find the problem. This asymmetry suggested that a few atmospheric muon neutrinos coming through the Earth had oscillated to (undetectable) tau neutrinos in transit, while those coming from above, having a far shorter path, had not had time to do so.

In 1998, a team of physicists led by Takaaki Kajita was using the Super Kamiokande (SuperK) experiment in Japan to study neutrinos created when cosmic rays from space hit the Earth’s atmosphere.

“Yes, there certainly was a Eureka moment in this experiment when we were able to see thatneutrinos appeared to change from one type to the other in traveling from the Sun to the Earth”, he said. Tuesday’s Nobel Prize is recognition of the early contributions of these extraordinary researchers. This was a prize for the integration of astronomy with high-energy particle physics, a new way of “looking” at the sky.

Incompleteness is the lifeblood of science. Yet in our current universe, we see only matter.

Michael Turner, director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, who knows both laureates, said, “neutrinos attract a special kind of person”. He is the co-founder of 13.7, a prolific author of papers and essays, and active promoter of science to the general public.

This is exotic and wonderful stuff, but why should neutrino oscillations and neutrino masses be worthy of popular, or even scientific, interest? They demonstrated that neutrinos oscillate and, therefore, that neutrinos have mass. This is a clear crack in the impressive façade of the Standard Model of particle physics and may well lead to a better and more complete theory.