# News 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics announcement

1. Oct 6, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
2. Oct 6, 2015

### Borg

It would be interesting to attend one of those.

3. Oct 6, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
You need a registration, a press ID, and to travel to Stockholm. I only have the last part covered - the Academy is order 1 km away from where I am sitting.
Later today we have a colloquium presentation of the Prize here at the AlbaNova University center.

4. Oct 6, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
Neutrino oscillations!!!!!

5. Oct 6, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
I think I know some experts on this subject ...

6. Oct 6, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
7. Oct 6, 2015

### Staff: Mentor

Well, I (and the rest of my grad school research group) would have been astonished if I had actually found neutrino oscillations in my dissertation project 33 years ago.

I figured that experiment would get the prize eventually. Congratulations to them!

8. Oct 6, 2015

### Greg Bernhardt

Congrats to the winners!!

9. Oct 6, 2015

### Greg Bernhardt

@robphy time to get them to UWLAX!

10. Oct 6, 2015

### Ygggdrasil

@mfb wrote a nice Insights article on the topic a few months ago: https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/neutrino-masses-speed

Somewhat disappointed that it didn't go to Vera Rubin and others for their work on dark matter. Hopefully, she'll still be around when the committee gets around to awarding the next astronomy-related prize.

[edit: thanks to robphy for pointing out the spelling mistake]

Last edited: Oct 6, 2015
11. Oct 6, 2015

### robphy

That probably should be Vera Rubin.

12. Oct 6, 2015

### atyy

Gosh, I was certain neutrino oscillations wouldn't get the prize this year - I had assumed they had already gotten it!

13. Oct 6, 2015

### Andrew Mason

I think congratulations are owed to a lot of people who worked on the Neutrino project, including Dr. McDonald and Dr. Kajita.

I did my undergraduate degree at Queen's and spent many hours in Stirling Hall. During my 4 years at Queen's I got to know many of the professors who eventually worked on the neutrino mass project with Dr. McDonald, including Dr. Hugh Evans, Dr. George Ewan and Dr. Hay Boon Mak,. During the summer of 1974 I had the pleasure of working there under Dr. Mak, then a research fellow. He was at that time part of the team at the Chalk River nuclear facility and he later went to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory when it was started in the 1980s. While my time at Queens was well before Dr. McDonald arrived, it is quite apparent that he was able to work with a very highly qualified group that worked very well together. I think they all deserve recognition in this.

AM

Last edited: Oct 7, 2015
14. Oct 6, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
Art McDonald once asked me back in 2006 or so if I would consider taking up an experimental post-doc with SNO. I guess that is how close I will ever get to work with a Nobel laureate.

Edit: Also, given my experimental skills, this was probably in the best interest of the collaboration

15. Oct 6, 2015

### dlgoff

Close enough for me.

16. Oct 6, 2015

### PWiz

Wow! So does this now mean that there is a greater probability of the 3 neutrino flavors being massive (and having different invariant masses)? What does the scientific community think about Lorentz-violating neutrino oscillations after this?

17. Oct 6, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
The results they were awarded the prize for are over a decade old so they are not really news to the scientific community. The results were (and still are) of great importance for the development of the experimental neutrino physics programme as well as for the theoretical developments.

The flavours themselves do not have specific masses. Instead, they are linear combinations of the different mass eigenstates - much in the same way as a quantum state in a superposition of states with different energy does not have a definite energy, but is a superposition of different energy eigenstates.

As for Lorentz invariance, neutrino oscillations are working perfectly fine in a Lorentz invariant framework.

18. Oct 6, 2015

### Staff: Mentor

At least two mass eigenstates have to be massive. The third could be massless, but there is no special reason to expect this.
There have never been Lorentz-violating observations of anything. There was a measurement error from OPERA four years ago that got fixed three years ago.

19. Oct 7, 2015

### mjsd

so glad to see this has finally happened. I was in my final years at high school when Super-K announced their results.....
and somehow I moved into the topic of neutrino models at uni

20. Oct 7, 2015

Staff Emeritus
The probability is the same as it was before the prize was awarded, no? Prizes don't influence nature.

Does that work? I don't think it's as simple as looking at the DeltaM terms. I think that derivation is done under the assumption of three non-zero masses.

21. Oct 7, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
It works perfectly fine. The approximation made in the usual heuristic derivation is $\sqrt{p^2 + m_i^2} \simeq p + m_i^2/2p$, which remains true even for $m_i = 0$ (in fact, for $m_i = 0$, it is no longer an approximation).

22. Oct 7, 2015

### PWiz

The fact that the nobel prize is being awarded for results obtained 10 years ago makes me feel that some other recent measurements have pointed in the same direction as the original results, lending credibility to the original experimental data. A nobel prize looks like a gesture of acknowledgement from the scientific community IMO, because I'm pretty sure the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences won't award it to someone for findings which some scientists find inconclusive.

23. Oct 7, 2015

### lisab

Staff Emeritus
Work with a laureate? No, not me, but I almost tripped Hans Dehmelt in the hallway when I was a student at UW.

24. Oct 7, 2015

### Orodruin

Staff Emeritus
In my first international physics conference, my supervisor told me I had just cut the line to the coffee break just in front of Lincoln Wolfenstein. Of course, I had no idea what he looked like at the time.

25. Oct 7, 2015

### robphy

When I was a grad student, I found Chandrasekhar's wallet in the library.
He was browsing the stacks earlier... and I guess his wallet fell out.