Scientists from Canada, Japan win Physics Nobel

Scientists from Canada, Japan win Physics Nobel

FPJ BureauUpdated: Friday, May 31, 2019, 09:59 PM IST
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NEW DELHI : NOBEL PRIZE FOR PHYSICS. PTI GRAPHICS(PTI10_6_2015_000219B) |

Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald share the prize for work on Neutrinos

Stockholm : Takaaki Kajita of Japan and Arthur McDonald of Canada won the Nobel Prize in physics for discovering the “chameleon-like” nature of neutrinos, work that yielded the crucial insight that the tiny particles have mass, reports PTI.

  The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said the two researchers had made key contributions to experiments showing that neutrinos change identities as they whiz through the universe at nearly the speed of light.

Neutrinos are miniscule particles created in nuclear reactions, such as in the sun and the stars, or in nuclear power plants.

There are three kinds of neutrinos and the laureates showed they oscillate from one kind to another, dispelling the long-held notion that they were massless.

“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.

Kajita, 56, is director of the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research and professor at the University of Tokyo. McDonald, 72, is a professor emeritus at Queen’s University in Kingston, Canada. The winners will split the 8 million Swedish kronor (about $ 960,000) prize money. Each winner also gets a diploma and a gold medal at the prize ceremony on December 10.

Kajita and McDonald made their discoveries while working at the Super-Kamiokande detector in Japan and Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, respectively.

Kajita showed in 1998 that neutrinos captured at the detector underwent a metamorphosis in the atmosphere, the academy said. Three years later McDonald found that neutrinos coming from the sun also switched identities.

McDonald told a news conference in Stockholm by telephone that the eureka moment was

when it became clear that his experiment had proven with great accuracy that neutrinos changed from one type to another in traveling from the sun to Earth.

Asked how he felt when he realised today that his work was suddenly going to receive the world’s focus, McDonald said, “It’s a very daunting experience, needless to say.” McDonald said that scientists would still like to know what the actual mass of the neutrino is. And experiments are looking at whether there are other types of neutrinos beyond the three clearly observed.

The University of Tokyo said in a statement congratulating Kajita that he was one of the students of 2002 Nobel physics winner Masatoshi Koshiba, who also has contributed to Japan’s neutrino research.

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UK universities a winner for Nobel Prize laureates

More than a third of Nobel prize winners who studied abroad were educated at British universities and the international student winners of the coveted award are greater than any other country, according to a new report.

  Fifty international student winners of the coveted award have been educated at UK universities, including Oxford and Cambridge – more than any other country.

The British Council study, which comes in the week the Nobel Institute announces the award winners for 2015, found that more Laureates who studied abroad chose to do so at Oxford, Cambridge and other UK universities than their American and German counterparts.

Since the prize began in 1901, a total of 860 individuals have received the award. Of those, 131 studied overseas for part of their education – 38 per cent completed their education in the UK.

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