3Q: The massive impact of neutrino research
Today, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in physics. The 2015 prize was awarded to Takaaki Kajita of the Super-Kamiokande Experiment and Arthur McDonald of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.” MIT associate professor of physics Joseph Formaggio, a member of the SNO collaboration, explains the implications of neutrino oscillations and MIT’s participation in SNO, and describes the active program in neutrino physics at MIT. Q: What are the implications of this year’s Nobel announcement? A: Neutrinos have long baffled scientists, ever since Wolfgang Pauli predicted their existence in 1930. For a long time, physicists had convinced themselves — based on the predictions of the Standard Model that describes particles and their interactions — that neutrinos should be massless particles. However, a number of oddities about neutrinos had started to become apparent in various...