Congratulations to CAP member, Art McDonald from SNOLAB/Queen’s Univ. on being awarded the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics with Takaaki Kajita from Super-Kamiokande in Japan

** The CAP’s Public Release is attached below. **

2015 October 6

The CAP gives its wholehearted congratulations to SNOLAB/Queen’s University’s Professor Arthur B. McDonald, who shares the 2015 Nobel Prize in Physics with Professor Takaaki Kajita of the University of Tokyo “for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.”

McDonald is a native of Sydney, Nova Scotia and obtained his BSc and MSc in physics at Dalhousie University, before going to CALTECH for his PhD. He worked at Chalk River Nuclear Laboratory from 1970 to 1982 and was on the faculty at Princeton University from 1982 until 1989. He has been a professor at Queen’s University since that time.

An active member of the CAP since 1971 and recipient of the CAP’s Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Physics in 2003, McDonald was the founding director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) in Sudbury, ON. SNO, which took data between 1999 and 2006, was one of several experiments to demonstrate that neutrinos have mass and oscillate from one species to another, one of the most important discoveries in fundamental science in recent decades. SNO was arguably the best of these experiments, since it was able to independently measure not only the electron neutrino flux but also the total flux, the latter being exactly as expected based on solar models. Thus SNO played a major role in the solution of the solar neutrino problem, one of the most perplexing outstanding problems of latter part of the 20th century.

Congratulations, Art!