Chinese Team Wins Breakthrough Prize for Neutrino Research

Chinese scientists have won the 2016 Breakthrough Prize Award in fundamental physics for their research on neutrino oscillation. The Chinese team, the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment, was led by Wang Yifang, a researcher with the Institute of High Energy Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS), and Professor Kam-Biu Luk of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

This is the first time Chinese scientists have won the prize, which was awarded at the Ames Research Center of the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

In 2012, after the neutrino experiment conducted near the Daya Bay Reactor in Guangdong Province, Chinese and foreign physicists announced that they had confirmed and measured a new type of neutrino oscillation.

The Chinese team will share the prize award equally with another four teams from Japan and Canada.

The award is presented to the five teams for the fundamental discovery and exploration of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics, according to a statement posted on the prize organization’s website.

Neutrinos, the wispy particles that flooded the universe in the earliest moments after the Big Bang, are continually produced in the hearts of stars and other nuclear reactions.