Arthur McDonald

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Arthur Bruce McDonald (born August 29, 1943 in Sydney , Nova Scotia ) is a Canadian physicist and director of the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Institute (SNO). He also has the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair (Chair) for Particle Astrophysics at Queen's University in Kingston , Ontario held. In 2015, he and Takaaki Kajita were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics .

education

McDonald received a B.Sc. in physics in 1964 and the M.Sc. in physics from Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia in 1965 . He received his Ph. D. in physics from the California Institute of Technology .

Academic career

McDonald worked as a scientist at Chalk River Laboratories northwest of Ottawa from 1970 to 1982 . From 1982 to 1989 he was Professor of Physics at Princeton University , where he was a senior scientist at the Princeton Cyclotron . He left Princeton in 1989 to become a professor at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario . At the same time he became director of the SNO in 1989. From 2002 he held the University Research Chair at Queen's University and from 2006 the Gordon and Patricia Gray Chair in Particle Astrophysics .

He was a visiting scientist at CERN (2004), Los Alamos National Laboratory (1981), Oxford, the University of Hawaii , the University of Washington in Seattle.

He is married and has four kids.

Research and Honors

Arthur McDonald at a press conference for the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences

In August 2001, a research group led by McDonald discovered that neutrinos from the sun actually oscillate into muon neutrinos ( ) and tau or tauon neutrinos ( ). This report was published in the Physical Review Letters and widely regarded as important. It is considered convincing evidence of the explanation of the riddle of solar neutrinos by neutrino oscillations (MSW effect).

McDonald and Yōji Totsuka were awarded the Benjamin Franklin Medal in Physics in 2007 . McDonald is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (1997) and the American Physical Society (1983). He holds multiple honorary doctorates (University College Cape Breton, Royal Military College (D. Sc.), Dalhousie University, University of Chicago (D. Sc.)).

In 2015 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics together with Takaaki Kajita "for the discovery of neutrino oscillations that show that neutrinos have a mass".

In 1969/70 he was a Rutherford Fellow and in 1998 a Killam Research Fellow. In 2003 he received the Tom W. Bonner Prize for Nuclear Physics for his leading role in solving the puzzle of solar neutrinos at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. In 2003 he received the Lifetime Achievement Medal of the Canadian Association of Physicists and in the same year the Canadian Gerhard Herzberg Gold Medal . In 2004 he received the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize and in 2016 the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics . He became Officer in 2007 and Companion of the Order of Canada in 2015, and was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2016.

Fonts

  • with Joshua R. Klein and David L. Wark: Solving the solar neutrino problem. In: Scientific American . April 2003
  • QR Ahmad et al. a. (SNO Collaboration): Direct Evidence for Neutrino Flavor Transformation from Neutral-Current Interactions in the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. In: Physical Review Letters. Volume 89, 2002, p. 011301, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.89.011301
  • QR Ahmad et al. a. (SNO Collaboration): Measurement of Day and Night Neutrino Energy Spectra at SNO and Constraints on Neutrino Mixing Parameters. In: Physical Review Letters. Volume 89, 2002, p. 011302, doi: 10.1103 / PhysRevLett.89.011302
  • The SNO Collaboration: The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory. In: Nuclear Instruments and Methods in Physics Research Section A. Volume 449, 2000, p. 172, doi: 10.1016 / S0168-9002 (99) 01469-2
  • with John N. Bahcall , Frank Calaprice, and Yoji Totsuka: Solar Neutrino Experiments: The Next Generation. In: Physics Today. July 1996, online

Web links

Commons : Arthur B. McDonald  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files