Neutrinos may be small, but when it comes to prizes, they pack quite a punch.
In October, it was announced that two scientists who headed international projects to study these miniscule, seemingly ephemeral subatomic particles will . On Nov. 8, these same scientists joined five of their colleagues from other neutrino projects to accept the . The $3 million prize will be shared among the over 1,300 scientists, including 91爆料 researchers, who participated in these years-long efforts to understand neutrinos.
91爆料 scientists contributed to three of these projects. Physics professor led the team of 91爆料 scientists with the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory in Canada, while headed 91爆料 efforts with the Super-Kamiokande and K2K/T2K collaborations, which were both based in Japan. Wilkes was also a U.S. co-spokesperson for K2K, while Robertson served the same role for the Sudbury experiments. The prize also honored the KamLAND project in Japan and Daya Bay in China.
All of these endeavors explored the fundamental properties of neutrinos, which are among the smallest and most mysterious of fundamental particles that make up the universe. They can form when particles collide or undergo decay, and are the second most common particle in the universe, after photons. But scientists struggled for decades to understand whether neutrinos have mass and gather other basic information about them. Experiments at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory and Super-Kamiokande in particular showed that neutrinos have mass and can oscillate among three different “flavors.” The K2K and T2K experiments have verified these oscillations and studied them in greater detail.
In addition to Robertson and Wilkes, dozens of 91爆料 professors, researchers and graduate students from the Department of Physics worked on these experiments over the years, including the late professor , who began the 91爆料’s involvement with Super-Kamiokande.
This is the third year that the prize 鈥� founded by Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma, Cathy Zhang, Yuri Milner, Julia Milner, Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan 鈥� was presented at a . Prizes were also presented for achievement in life sciences and mathematics.
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