Neutrinos. Want To Know More?

We hear a lot about the 'brain drain' in Canada so it's nice to point it out when a Canadian brain, residing in Canada, does something cool and gets an award for it. Not just any award either, a very prestigious one called the Benjamin Franklin Medal. How prestigious is it? "Previous winners of the Benjamin Franklin Medals — which date back to 1824 — include Albert Einstein, Alexander Graham Bell and Orville Wright, with more than 100 Franklin winners going on to win Nobel Prizes." Yep, that's pretty prestigious!

So who is he and what did he do?

Art McDonald is a Queen's University physicist (and director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Institute who was working with Yoji Totsuka from the University of Tokyo (they will share this award). They were studying neutrinos which are "an essential part of the Standard Model of physics and help explain everything from radioactive decay to the processes that occurred during the Big Bang" and are one of the fundamental particles that make up the universe.

What they discovered is that "the three known types of neutrinos can change into one another when travelling long distances and that they have mass."

This may seem like a very simple discovery but is, of course, not. With this revelation the idea that solar neutrinos disappear as they move through objects was refuted as it turns out they were just changing into other kinds of neutrinos. It has also led others in the field to "make connections to other areas of physics, such as the high-energy processes that are thought to have taken place during the first moments of the universe". Sounds righteous to me!


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