Japan's Takaaki Kajita and Canada's Arthur B. McDonald won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery that neutrinos have mass, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
Japan's Takaaki Kajita and Canada's Arthur B. McDonald won the 2015 Nobel Prize for Physics for their discovery that neutrinos have mass, the award-giving body said on Tuesday.
"The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe," the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said in a statement awarding the 8 million Swedish crown ($962,000) prize.
Physics is the second of this year's Nobels. The prizes were first awarded in 1901 to honour achievements in science, literature and peace in accordance with the will of dynamite inventor and business tycoon Alfred Nobel.
"The Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 recognises Takaaki Kajita in Japan and Arthur B. McDonald in Canada, for their key contributions to the experiments which demonstrated that neutrinos change identities. This metamorphosis requires that neutrinos have mass. The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe," the academy said in a statement.
Takaaki Kajita discovered that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities whereas Arthur B McDonald and his research team observed that the neutrinos from the Sun were not disappearing on their way to Earth. Instead they were captured with a different identity when arriving to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory.
According to the statement by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the discovery rewarded with this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics have yielded crucial insights into the all but hidden world of neutrinos. After photons, the particles of light, neutrinos are the most numerous in the entire cosmos. The Earth is constantly bombarded by them.
Many neutrinos are created in reactions between cosmic radiation and the Earth’s atmosphere. Others are produced in nuclear reactions inside the Sun. Thousands of billions of neutrinos are streaming through our bodies each second. Hardly anything can stop them passing; neutrinos are nature’s most elusive elementary particles.
(With Reuters Inputs)
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