Southampton professors celebrate link to 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics

The Nobel Prize in Physics for 2015 has been awarded to Takaaki Kajita (University of Tokyo, Japan) and to Arthur B. McDonald (Queen’s University, Canada) ‘for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass’ and for ‘key contributions to the experiments which demonstrated that neutrinos change identities’ (Nobel, 2015).

Takaaki Kajita is collaborator and the scientist in charge of the University of Tokyo node of the European Innovative Training Network (ITN) ‘Invisibles: Neutrinos, Dark Matter and Dark Energy’, which has neutrino oscillations as one of its major research lines. This network comprises 29 nodes, including an active sub-group in Physics and Astronomy at the University of Southampton. The Southampton node is led by Professor Steve King and assisted by Dr Pasquale Di Bari, both of whom are experts in neutrino physics. The ‘Invisibles’ network has recently been awarded substantial additional EU RISE H2020 funding for international networking activities, called ‘Invisibles Plus’. The Southampton node of this project will also be led by Professor King.

In 1998 Takaaki Kajita presented to the world the discovery that neutrinos produced in the atmosphere switch between two identities on their way to Earth. Arthur McDonald subsequently led the Canadian collaboration which demonstrated that neutrinos from the sun do not disappear on their way to Earth, but change identity by the time of arrival to the SNO detector. The Nobel Prize for 2015 states that, ‘the discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe.’

The Southampton node of the ‘Invisibles’ includes Professor Steve King (Scientist in charge), Dr Pasquale Di Bari (Reader in Physics), Thomas Neder (Invisibles ESR), Dr Ivo de Medeiros Varzielas (Marie Curie Fellow), Dr Patrick Ludl (Postdoctoral Research Assistant), Fredrik Bjorkeroth (PhD student), Maria Dimou (PhD student), Andrew Meadowcroft (PhD student), Miguel Crispim Romao (PhD student) and Nick Prouse (NExT PhD student). In addition to the above, ‘Invisibles Plus’ includes Professor Christopher Sachrajda, Professor Jonathan Flynn, Professor Alexander Belyaev, Professor Stefano Moretti, Professor Konstantinos Skenderis and Professor Marika Taylor .