On October 6th 2015, two scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in physics for the discovery of neutrino oscillations. The discovery, which was made by Takaaki Kajita and Arther B McDonald, definitively proves that neutrinos do have mass. The announcement was made during a press conference by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The two men will share an award of 8 million Swedish Krona ($964,000).
The two physicists led separate teams, Kajita at the University of Tokyo in Japan and McDonald at Queen's University in Canada. They each used massive detectors designed to alert them if a neutrino had passed through them. Neutrinos have very little mass, no electric charge, and rarely interact with other particles. They are found as the result of radioactive decay and most notably as a by product of the nuclear fusion reaction that powers the sun.
Because they rarely interact with anything, billions of them, streaming from the sun, pass through the earth and our bodies every second. Neutrinos come in what is called, three "flavors," electron, muon, and tau. The experiments conducted by Kajita and McDonald revealed that one type of neutrino could turn into another by a process called oscillation. It was further determined that this process occurs as neutrinos travel from the sun towards the earth.
It is not yet known what the mass of each of the three flavors of neutrinos are, but it is believed that it is very small, on the order of at least a million times smaller than the mass of the electron. Some scientists believe that the success of the experiments by Kajita and McDonald will not only help to increase our understanding of how the fusion process works inside the sun, but it may also one day aide in the creation of fusion reactors here on earth.
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