U of I Professor Contributed to Nobel Prize Winning Research

The biggest question in neutrino oscillation physics, though, is whether neutrinos and antimatter neutrinos oscillate the same way.

Could dark matter be made up of neutrinos?

Meanwhile, astrophysicists were incorporating nuclear reactions into realistic models of the Sunday. An area of the mine was filled with a hundred thousand gallons of cleaning fluid. When a neutrino hit a chlorine nucleus, it would convert it into argon.

Monday: William C. Campbell and Satoshi Omura were awarded the Nobel Prize Physiology or Medicine, for discoveries concerning the treatment of infections caused by roundworm parasites, jointly (half and half) with Youyou Tu, for discoveries concerning “a novel therapy against malaria”.

Because neutrinos interact so weakly, they can travel huge distances. What they found out was that the neutrino is even more interesting than we thought.

In 1970, chemist Ray Davis built a large experiment created to detect neutrinos from the Sunday.

We haven’t been able to take apart electrons or quarks.

The University of Tokyo said in a statement congratulating Kajita that he was one of the students of 2002 Nobel physics victor Masatoshi Koshiba, who also has contributed to Japan’s neutrino research. A handful of top goals came out of the process, including “Execute a program with the U.S.as host that provides precision tests of the neutrino sector with an underground detector”. In spite of a flux of about 100,000 trillion solar neutrinos per second, neutrinos interact so rarely that he expected to see only about a couple dozen argon atoms after a week’s running.

One of the most promising ideas ties the oscillation of neutrinos with the fact that our universe exists at all.

The work was focused on proving that neutrinos, an elementary particle like protons and electrons, has mass. Instead, it changes as time passes. “Neutrinos could give a clue regarding this”, said Mondal. In the nineteen-eighties, my colleague Sheldon Glashow and I coined the phrase “just-so neutrino oscillations” to describe this process. The work revealed that the three flavors of neutrino can interconvert as the particles stream through space. McDonald, 72, is a professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. It contained tons of heavy water, provided on loan from the Canadian government. Their ubiquity, however, comes with an infinitesimal propensity to react with matter. This suggested that electron neutrinos can, in fact, oscillate into other neutrinos.

The prize will be awarded in Stockholm on December 10 to Arthur B. McDonald, who led the project in the nickel mine, and Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo, who led experiments in a Japanese zinc mine. It centered on a detector created inside a mine in Japan, designed to detect neutrinos coming not from the sun but from the upper atmosphere. The new neutrino became known as the muon neutrino.

Neutrinos were only detected in 1956 by Americans Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan, who used a fission reactor as a source. So where is neutrino research heading next – and what could it discover? We believe their mass is generated differently.

Around the turn of the millennium, Kajita and McDonald, using different experiments, managed to explain this by showing that neutrinos actually changed identities, or “flavors,” and therefore must have a few mass, however small. In layman’s terms, his discovery demonstrates that neutrinos hold mass. The standard model can not be complete. Another possibility is that we’ll get to the core. So where did all the anti-matter go? And we still have much more to learn about neutrinos. And it is the mysteries in life that make living so exciting.