Penn Physicists Share in Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Collaboration, which includes physicists from Penn Arts and Sciences, is sharing the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics. The prize was presented by the Breakthrough Prize Foundation “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.” The $3 million prize is shared with four other international experimental collaborations studying neutrino oscillations: the Super-Kamiokande, KamLAND, T2K/K2K, and Daya Bay scientific collaborations.

The research at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, two kilometers underground in the Vale Creighton mine near Sudbury, Ontario, demonstrated that neutrinos change their type, or “flavor,” on their way to Earth from the sun, a discovery that requires neutrinos to have a mass greater than zero. The results also confirmed the theories of energy generation in the sun with great accuracy, solving a decades-old question known as the Solar Neutrino Problem.

The Penn group, which includes Professors of Physics and Astronomy Eugene Beier and Joshua Klein, began working on the SNO project in 1987. Their contributions include constructing specialized electronic instrumentation for the detector’s 9,600 photo sensors and leading both the detector operations and the data analysis for the project.

“The Penn team was an exceptional group of people who made major contributions to this important science,” says Klein. “We are happy to have been a part of solving a problem that was older than many of the group members.”

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