LSU physicists contribute to Nobel winning research

McDonald, who now works at Queen’s University in Canada, received the award with University of Tokyo researcher Takaaki Kajita from the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences for their research and discoveries regarding the subatomic particles, neutrinos. Proposed by Wolfgang Pauli in 1930, they are known as “ghost particles” for their uncanny ability to fly through matter practically as if it didn’t exist.

Could dark matter be made up of neutrinos?

Ereditato said the idea that neutrinos could transform from one type into another was first put forward in the late 1950s, but scientists’ understanding of the process was rather vague until Kajita’s announced his discovery in 1998. “Our alumni’s success will encourage us”. We don’t know yet where the massive neutrinos will lead us. These beams have allowed scientists to study neutrino oscillation in great detail and established the U.S.as a leader in neutrino physics. An area of the mine was filled with a hundred thousand gallons of cleaning fluid.

Because neutrinos interact so weakly, they can travel enormous distances.

“There are also questions regarding matter and antimatter asymmetry; as in, why do we see matter but not antimatter?”

Connor McDavid and other National Hockey League stars will continue to attract more attention, as will the top Canadian actors, musicians and other entertainers. Determining the absolute weight of neutrinos is something his team at the Karlsruhe Tritium Neutrino experiment, or KATRIN, hopes to start working on next year.

Back in 2012, he contributed to the research that won the prize that year.

“The resolution of the solar neutrino flux was the major result”, says Frank Close, a particle physicist at the University of Oxford.

“It changes our understanding of the cosmos itself”.

The breakthrough has shaken the previous Standard Model of particle physics and a decades-old physics puzzle.

In addition to explaining the solar neutrino deficit, these discoveries implied that neutrinos are not massless-according to theory, oscillations are only possible if there are differences in mass between the three flavors. The “oscillation” comes in thanks to quantum mechanics. Instead, it changes as time passes. There are three types of neutrinos: electron, muon and tau.

Their findings have thus proved to be invaluable to other experiments concerning neutrinos all across the globe. The possibility of neutrino oscillations was first raised in 1957, but the Nobel-winning work demonstrated that such oscillations really do occur. But as the neutrino has no charge, it is hard to know what its anti-particle would look like.

At SNO a 12-meter-diameter acrylic sphere containing 1000 tons of D2O was monitored by 9500 photomultiplier tubes. This suggested that electron neutrinos can, in fact, oscillate into other neutrinos.

Kajita is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at the University of Tokyo. These detectors are isolated deep underground in abandoned mines.

Neutrinos are forged in various ways: by stars, by nuclear reactor decay or by reactions between cosmic radiation and the Earth’s atmosphere. In the mine, those muon neutrinos scattered off of hydrogen nuclei in the water, converting into muons.

Kajita also thanked for the town of Kamioka, in Japan’s northern prefecture of Toyama, for hosting the Super-Kamiokande and its predecessor. In the 1960s, scientists studying neutrinos from the sun were detecting only a third of the number of particles they expected to see.

In fact, we would be without virtually all of our modern conveniences were it not for the efforts of people with inquiring minds who pondered the world around them and figured out how things worked and how to use their discoveries for practical purposes.

Neutrinos are very weird particles. The reason is simple. So where is neutrino research heading next – and what could it discover? There is new physics remaining to be discovered, perhaps at the Large Hadron Collider, or by means of another machine that has yet to be built. So where did all the anti-matter go? And it is the mysteries in life that make living so exciting.