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Neutrino 'Flip' Discovery Earns Nobel For Japanese, Canadian Researchers
Dave Knott writes with news that the 2015 Nobel Prize in physics has been awarded to Takaaki Kajita (of the University of Tokyo in Japan) and Arthur McDonald (of Queens University in Canada), for discovering how neutrinos switch between different "flavours." As the linked BBC article explains:
In 1998, Prof Kajita's team reported that neutrinos they had caught, bouncing out of collisions in the Earth's atmosphere, had switched identity: they were a different "flavour" from what those collisions must have released. Then in 2001, the group led by Prof McDonald announced that the neutrinos they were detecting in Ontario, which started out in the Sun, had also "flipped" from their expected identity. This discovery of the particle's wobbly identity had crucial implications. It explained why neutrino detections had not matched the predicted quantities — and it meant that the baffling particles must have a mass. This contradicted the Standard Model of particle physics and changed calculations about the nature of the Universe, including its eternal expansion.
Sorry we hosed up your Standard Model, eh.
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Spelling it correctly would be a worthwhile milestone on your quest.
So what exactly does a neutrino taste like?
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
While it is physics beyond the Standard Model it is really easy to incorporate it into the model. In fact it makes the leptons more like the quarks in that they now both have a mixing matrix.
It's fantastic to hear that Art finally won the Nobel though - many of us were wondering how long it would be before he did! It's very well deserved for a discovery which was at least as significant, and far more surprising, than the Higgs.
Suddenly sounds a lot more feasible.
Like "why does this lump of rock ruin my film?" and "as if we'd ever figure out how to stick two atoms together?"
If you want a practical application of neutrino detectors and their relevance today, you need look no further than Online Monitoring of the Osiris Reactor with the Nucifer Neutrino Detector which has direct applications in the field of nonproliferation. Here's a map of the world as a function of its antineutrino flux. It's a little low-res as of last month, but it looks really interesting - as in, it's a map of every nuclear reactor on earth - once you subtract out the background from decay of naturally-occurring elements in the crust.
Not only have we used knowledge of new fundamental particles to learn how to split and fuse the atom to release energies that would have been unimaginable to the Curies, we can use knowledge of newer, harder-to-detect, and "irrelevant" fundamental particles to detect bad actors trying to build bombs on the sly. If the fundamental particles underlying the first nuclear war are Nobel-worthy, surely the particles that are being measured in order to prevent history's second nuclear war, ought to be worthy of consideration, even if nobody's figured out how to make a bomb out of them.
It is disappointing to see the high energy physicists continue to dominate the nobel prize. Since the 1930s, anyone who discovers some new quirk about some fundamental particle gets the prize.
I'm not sure what you mean by dominate but a significant share of prizes awarded in the last fifteen years were for physics with clear practical applications, including LEDs (2014), graphene (2010), fiber optics and CCDs (2009), giant magnetoresistance (2007), laser spectroscopy (2005), and the integrated circuit (2000). The 2003 prize was given for "contributions to the theory of superconductors and superfluids". Other years the prizes was awarded for astrophysics: 2011, 2006 and 2002. The other prizes appear to be for quantum physics, but not all of them deal with LHC-type of high energy physics.
McFlip to be offered soon at McDonald's everywhere.
Repeating memes isn't an "internet" thing, it's an "idiot" thing.
Alfred Nobel's will says that his estate should fund 'prizes to those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit to mankind'. He lived in an age when physics was the study of the fundamental problems facing engineers of his day. Look at the careers of Kelvin or Helmholtz or Maxwell to see how closely tied these areas were. (Kelvin built transatlantic telegraph equipment, Maxwell developed color photography and studied bridge design, Helmholtz worked on physiology and thermodynamics inspired by applied science). I suspect the distance between modern fundamental particle physics and practical benefits to humanity might seem very foreign to Nobel were he alive to see it.
My concern is not actually for a subfield of physics. Applied research is often better funded than traditional reductionist physics. My concern is for physics as a discipline, and for the career path our brightest young aspiring physicists are directed down. We are at a cross-roads. Either physics will be the search for ever more fundamental models of the constituents of matter that become ever more irrelevant, and all the useful work will be done by people who call themselves something else. Or physics will become the application of quantitative models to fundamental problems in wide areas of science, and much of modern science will become ever more indistinguishable from applied physics. In the former case physics drifts into obscurity. In the latter case, physics strengthens its place as the central and fundamental science.