Kajita and McDonald win Nobel physics prize for work on neutrinos

[muriel_volestrangler]

The Nobel prize in physics has been awarded to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur McDonald for their work on subatomic particles called neutrinos.

The scientists from the University of Tokyo and Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, have won the prize “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass”.

The Nobel committee said the discovery by Kajita and McDonald that neutrinos can alter their identities had “changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe”.
...
Kajita and McDonald’s had discovered that the apparently missing subatomic particles had in fact changed identities. This implied that neutrinos, which physicists had thought were massless, must have mass, which in turn meant that the so-called standard model of physics cannot be complete in its explanation of the fundamental building blocks of the universe.

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/oct/06/kajita-and-mcdonald-win-nobel-physics-prize-for-work-on-neutrinos

[xocet]

1. Here is the Particle Data Group's review of neutrino oscillations etc....

14. Neutrino mixing

14. NEUTRINO MASS, MIXING, AND OSCILLATIONS
Updated May 2014 by K. Nakamura (Kavli IPMU (WPI), U. Tokyo, KEK), and S.T. Petcov (SISSA/INFN Trieste, Kavli IPMU (WPI), U. Tokyo, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences).

The experiments with solar, atmospheric, reactor and accelerator neutrinos have provided compelling evidences for oscillations of neutrinos caused by nonzero neutrino masses and neutrino mixing. The data imply the existence of 3-neutrino mixing in vacuum. We review the theory of neutrino oscillations, the phenomenology of neutrino mixing, the problem of the nature - Dirac or Majorana, of massive neutrinos, the issue of CP violation in the lepton sector, and the current data on the neutrino masses and mixing parameters. The open questions and the main goals of future research in the field of neutrino mixing and oscillations are outlined.

...

http://pdg.lbl.gov/2014/reviews/rpp2014-rev-neutrino-mixing.pdf