In anticipation for the announcements of the Nobel Prize 2017, we will finish up the stories behind the particles included in the Nobel Prize Collection reflective slap bracelet. If you missed the beginning, go here for part 1.
1988 – The Muon Neutrino
Colleagues Leon M. Lederman, Melvin Schwartz and Jack Steinberger shared the Nobel Prize “for the neutrino beam method and the demonstration of the doublet structure of the leptons through the discovery of the muon neutrino“. Neutrinos have no charge, very little mass and limited willingness to interact with and leave tracks in particle detectors. The research trio used a multistep process to produce a neutrino beam by creating showers of pi mesons from a proton beam and then let the mesons decay in layers of thick battleship steel. All that was left on the other side of the steel were muon neutrinos of which some interact to produce muons that could be detected. Read more here>
1995 – Neutrino and Tau
In 1995, the Nobel Prize in physics “for pioneering experimental contributions to lepton physics” was shared between Martin L. Perl
“for the discovery of the tau lepton” (1975) and Frederick Reines
“for the detection of the neutrino” (1959).
As mentioned above, the neutrino is challenging to detect, but its discovery was a milestone in understanding nuclear decay as well as processes in the sun and elsewhere in the universe and is important for backtracking to what happened when our universe was formed.
The discovery of the tau opened the door to a third quark-lepton family, today consisting of the tau and tau neutrino along with the top and bottom quarks.
2013 – The Higgs Boson
After waiting 50 years from theoretical prediction to discovery, François Englert and Peter W. Higgs received the Nobel Prize “for the theoretical discovery of a mechanism that contributes to our understanding of the origin of mass of subatomic particles, and which recently was confirmed through the discovery of the predicted fundamental particle, by the ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider.” The Higgs boson provide an explanation for the origins of mass. It was hypothesized to fill space and interact with the most basic particles in a way that gives them mass when otherwise they would have none. We have written more about the Higgs here.
What’s next?
The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences selects the Nobel Laureates in Physics. Who they will award with the Nobel Prize 2017 will be announced Tuesday, October 3rd.
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