The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Nobel Prize in Physics for 2015 to Takaaki Kajita of Super-Kamiokande Collaboration, University of Tokyo, Kashiwa, Japan and Arthur B. McDonald of Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”.
According to the Academy, “The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe. Around the turn of the millennium, Takaaki Kajita presented the discovery that neutrinos from the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan.
“Meanwhile, the research group in Canada led by Arthur B. McDonald could demonstrate 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.
“A neutrino puzzle that physicists had wrestled with for decades had been resolved. Compared to theoretical calculations of the number of neutrinos, up to two thirds of the neutrinos were missing in measurements performed on Earth. Now, the two experiments discovered that the neutrinos had changed identities.”
