The prize was awarded to Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo and Arthur B McDonald of Queen’s University, Kingston, Canada, for their discovery that neutrinos oscillate between different types, which is only possible if neutrinos have mass – the particles were previously thought to be massless.
IOP president Professor Roy Sambles said: “The discovery of neutrino oscillation and that they have mass solves one of the long-standing problems in physics – that the Sun didn’t seem to be producing as many neutrinos as we thought it should. Now we know that they were switching between different types of neutrino.
“The neutrino had long been assumed to have no mass, so this one of those discoveries that’s going to change how we see the universe. It’s really quite inspiring.”
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