Kajita And McDonald Receive Nobel Prize In Physics

McDonald’s research was conducted at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO, or SNOLAB), where McDonald serves as Director.

Hopefully, a few of them will come from Nova Scotia, inspired by Arthur McDonald’s example of excellence in the pursuit of basic science and our understanding of the universe.

McDonald’s contribution included a 2001 discovery that neutrinos from the sun also changed their identities. And experiments are looking at whether there are other types of neutrinos beyond the three clearly observed. In a news conference at the University of Tokyo, Kajita told the audience he wanted “to thank the neutrinos, of course”.

Mcdonald’s and Kajita’s neutrino experiments answered the puzzling question of why less are actually detected when there should be more of them. The discovery was described by the Nobel committee as “groundbreaking” because it exposed the Standard Model of particle physics – which has survived repeated experimental challenges for more than 20 years – as flawed because it required neutrinos to be without mass. He said he is grateful to the neutrinos and their creators, the cosmic rays.

The Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded Tuesday to two scientists who figured out how to identify them.

“New discoveries about their deepest secrets are expected to change our current understanding of the history, structure and future fate of the universe”, the statement concludes. 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?

The Nobel Committee rewarded the two scientists for their work on neutrinos, ubiquitous subatomic particles that are extremely hard to study.

The universe is swamped in neutrinos that are left over from the Big Bang, and many more are created in nuclear reactions on the Earth and in the thermonuclear reactions that power the Sunday. This showed that the standard model of the innermost workings of matter cannot be the complete theory of the fundamental constituents of the Universe.

They share a prize of $960,000 awarded by the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Kajita showed in 1998 that neutrinos captured at the detector underwent a metamorphosis in the atmosphere, the academy said.

McDonald said there was a “eureka moment” when they discovered that neutrinos were able to change from one type to another in travelling from the sun to the Earth. The will of the Swedish inventor Alfred Nobel established the prizes in 1895.

Kajita, like most Nobel Prize winners, was surprised to get the call this morning letting him know of his achievement.

On Monday, Tu Youyou of China, Irish-born American William Campbell, and Japan’s Satoshi Omura won the Nobel Medicine Prize for unlocking revolutionary treatments for malaria and roundworm, diseases that blight millions of lives.