Two scientists share 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Committee said the research done by Kajita, of the University of Tokyo, and MacDonald, of Queen’s University, Canada, has changed the world’s understanding of the innermost workings of matter.

The scientists showed that neutrinos, which are found in three “flavors,” could oscillate from one flavor to another – changing identities as they traveled through the atmosphere or through space from the sun – demonstrating that they have mass. Around the turn of the century, Kajita and his colleagues recorded evidence of neutrinos changing identities during the 183-mile journey from the proton accelerator lab in Tokai that generated them to the detector.

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

And yet physicists were mystified as to why two-thirds of these particles, called neutrinos, seemed to be missing in action. The neutrino had always been assumed to have no mass, so this one of those discoveries that’s going to change how we see the universe.

“A far-reaching conclusion of the experiments is that the neutrino, for a long time considered to be massless, must have mass”, the academy said.

The winners will split the 8 million Swedish kronor (about $960,000) prize money.

Previous winners of the Nobel Prize for Physics include Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg and Marie Curie. Before their discovery, it was generally believed that these elementary particles did not have mass.

“Neutrinos are among the fundamental particles (which) we do not know how to subdivide any further”, McDonald told reporters in Stockholm by phone.

So besides revealing solar processes, neutrinos are a crucial part of any model of the basic particles of the universe and the forces through which they interact.

Since the 1960s, scientists had estimated the number of neutrinos created in the nuclear reactions that make the Sun shine.

Discoveries by the Nobel physics laureates have bolstered the notion that neutrinos may have protected us all from complete annihilation by tilting the balance between matter and antimatter, said Hitoshi Murayama, director of the Kavli Institute for the Physcis and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo. And yet you do it with techniques that involve the study of the most microscopic particles.

Neutrinos are ubiquitous, they constantly pass through the earth and human bodies as they continue their three-state cosmic journey.

Each recipient receives a gold medal, a diploma and a monetary award, which is decided by the Nobel Foundation.

Yesterday, the Nobel Foundation announced the Prize in physiology or medicine to a trio of scientists for discovering novel treatments for parasitic infections.