Wed, Oct 07, 2015 page1

• Japanese, Canadian share Nobel prize for solving puzzle of elusive neutrinos

  NEW WINDOW: The two scientists showed that neutrinos have mass, paving the way to a better understanding of the evolution of the universe

  • Reuters and NY Times News Service, STOCKHOLM and LONDON
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  A Japanese and a Canadian scientist yesterday won the Nobel Prize for Physics for discovering that elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos have mass, opening a new window onto the fundamental nature of the universe.

  Neutrinos are the second-most bountiful particles after photons, the particles of light, with trillions of them streaming through our bodies every second, but their true nature has been poorly understood.

  Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald’s breakthrough was the discovery of a phenomenon called neutrino oscillation that has upended scientific thinking and promises to change understanding about the history and future fate of the cosmos.

  

  Takaaki Kajita, a professor at the University of Tokyo Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, yesterday receives a congratulatory phone call from Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at a press conference at the university after it was announced that he was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics.

  Photo: AFP

  “It is a discovery that will change the books in physics, so it is really a major discovery,” said Barbro Asman, a Nobel committee member and professor of physics at Stockholm University.

  In awarding the prize, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the finding had “changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe.”

  For many years, the central enigma with neutrinos was that up to two-thirds fewer of them were detected on Earth than expected.

  

  Arthur MacDonald, professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Canada, speaks on the phone yesterday shortly after learning that he was a co-winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics at his home in Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

  Photo: Reuters

  Kajita and McDonald, using different experiments, managed to explain this around the turn of the millennium by showing that neutrinos actually changed identities, or “flavors,” and therefore must have some mass, however small.

  McDonald, a Canadian citizen born in 1943, was awakened by the Nobel committee and asked to call in to the prize announcement in Stockholm.

  “It’s a very daunting experience, needless to say,” he told reporters by telephone. “Fortunately, I have many colleagues as well who share this prize with me.”

  He said that the discovery not only gave scientists a more complete understanding of the world at a fundamental level, but could also shed light on the science behind fusion power, which drives the sun and could one day be tapped as a source of electricity on Earth.

  “Yes, there certainly was a eureka moment in this experiment when we were able to see that neutrinos appeared to change from one type to the other in traveling from the sun to the Earth,” he said.

  Informed by phone of the prize, Kajita, who was born in 1959 in Japan, and directs the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research at the University of Tokyo, said simply: “Kind of unbelievable.”

  Kajita and McDonald are to share the 8 million Swedish kronor (US$960,000) prize. They joined 199 laureates, including Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and Marie Curie, who have been honored with the prize since 1901.
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