UA Physicists Share in Breakthrough Prize for Neutrino Research

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — A team of University of Alabama physicists has received recognition for making key contributions to a landmark study of neutrinos that won the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics recently in California.

The $3 million prize, awarded earlier this month, celebrates a series of experiments involving physicists and labs around the world.  They investigated neutrino oscillation and mass. The experiments showed that neutrinos — neutral subatomic particles and fundamental constituents of matter — have mass and that they change character as they travel through space. Before this work, neutrinos were believed to be massless.

The landmark study to which the UA team contributed is called the KamLAND experiment. The Breakthrough Price selection committee cited KamLAND “for the fundamental discovery and exploration of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

“Neutrinos come in what physicists call three different flavors,” said Dr. Andreas Piepke, UA professor of physics and astronomy and one of the scientists cited in the award. “The results of these experiments and others demonstrate that these particles can change character while they’re traveling. That is of profound importance for our understanding of particle physics.”

At UA, the faculty members and students in the department of physics and astronomy cited in the prize include Piepke; Dr. Jerry Busenitz, professor of physics and astronomy; former UA postdoctoral assistant Dr. Evgueni Yakushev; and former UA graduate students Zelimir Djurcic, Dong-Ming Mei and Kevin McKinny.

“It’s a good deal that graduate students from The University of Alabama shared in such a prestigious prize,” Piepke said. “It’s a good deal for them, too.”

The KamLAND experiment uses 1,000 tons of organic scintillation fluid and is the largest liquid scintillation detector ever built. The detector is situated in the Kamioka underground laboratory in Hida, Japan. Work on the project, performed by an international collaboration, began in 1998. The publication cited by the awards committee appeared in 2003. The experiment is ongoing.

“The main contributions of the UA group were to minimize and control the backgrounds to the neutrino signal due to radioactivity and to calibrate the detector response to neutrinos,” Busenitz said.

The massive sets of experiments, recognized by this prize and involving labs across the globe, represent an achievement of contemporary science – collaborators were able to coordinate experiments using modern communication avenues.

“The collaboration was quite large,” Busenitz said. “It’s difficult to imagine doing this experiment 30 or 40 years ago. This was a collaboration of over 100 physicists, engineers, and technicians building and operating a large complex detector and analyzing extremely large datasets. Forty years ago, that would have been very difficult using the means of communication and computing technologies available then.”

In total, more than 1,300 individual physicists share in the Breakthrough Prize for their work.

The Breakthrough Prize and its founders Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, announced the recipients of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, Fundamental Physics and Mathematics. A combined total of $21.9 million was awarded at the third annual Breakthrough Prize Awards ceremony Monday, Nov. 9, in Silicon Valley, California.

The department of physics and astronomy is part of UA’s College of Arts and Sciences, the University’s largest division and the largest liberal arts college in the state. Students from the College have won numerous national awards including Rhodes Scholarships, Goldwater Scholarships and memberships on the USA Today Academic All American Team.