The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, or SNO ball. (credit: NASA APOD)
In some ways, the Standard Model of physics is an intellectual triumph, predicting the existence of a particle—the Higgs boson—decades before we developed the technology to actually detect its existence. That discovery was honored with a recent Nobel Prize.
This year's Physics Nobel honors the flip side of the Standard Model: it's been broken for years, and we have no idea how to fix it. The discovery that broke it involved finding out that particles called neutrinos can change identity and therefore must have mass. The Standard Model had predicted they were massless, and it has no mechanism to provide them mass.
The Nobel itself honors the people behind two detectors—Super Kamiokande in Japan and Canada's Sudbury Neutrino Observatory—that first confirmed this change in identity: Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald, respectively.
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