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Researchers from the UK are celebrating after winning the $3 million Breakthrough Prize for Fundamental Physics thanks to their crucial work in neutrino science at the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) and T2K experiments.

The UK’s Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) (and its predecessor funding agencies) funded the UK side of the neutrino research at the SNO and T2K experiments. Oxford University physicists were the only UK researchers involved in the SNO project, based in Canada, which also won a share of the Nobel Prize in Physics last month for the ground-breaking discovery of neutrino oscillation and the UK T2K collaboration consisted of scientists from seven UK university research teams along with STFC.

Professor Dave Wark, Director of Particle Physics at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Professor in Experimental Particle Physics at Oxford University and former UK Co-Spokesperson for SNO said: ‘You wait a decade for a prize and then two come along at once. It is great to see our experiments recognised for the contributions they have made to our understanding of fundamental physics. What is even more fun is trying to guess what the next generation of neutrino experiments will find – what you don’t know is always more fascinating than what you do know.’

Scientists at the STFC’s Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury Laboratories were also heavily involved in collaborating with UK university scientists on designing, building and operating key parts of the T2K detectors.

Professor Steve Biller, Professor of Experimental Particle Physics at Oxford University, UK Co-Spokesperson for SNO, and UK Spokesperson for the SNO+ experiment, said: ‘It’s been fantastic to have received this recognition. The experiment wasn’t easy, and sometimes the line between a complete disaster and winning both a Nobel and Breakthrough Prize can be pretty thin – it took an exceptional team of people to pull this off.

‘The discovery of neutrino oscillations changed the landscape of particle physics, leading to numerous other experimental neutrino efforts and the establishment of new university groups all aiming to learn more about this mysterious phenomenon.’

Following on from the discoveries of SNO, a number of UK universities went on to help create the multi-national T2K experiment (based in Japan) to investigate other parameters of neutrino oscillation. With three different types of neutrinos, it is possible for three different oscillation mixings to take place, and T2K was one of the two key experiments honoured with the Breakthrough Prize for the discovery of the last of these mixings.

Professor Alfons Weber from STFC’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory and also Rokos-Clarendon Fellow in Physics at the University of Oxford said “This is a fantastic recognition of the hard work of many people. We all feel proud to be part of this. But this is only the beginning. We are now preparing the next generation of experiments, which will unlock even more of the neutrino’s secrets. And who knows, we may find that neutrinos are the very reason that we exist”

The UK T2K collaboration consists of scientists from Imperial College London (including the current International Co-Spokesperson Dr. Morgan Wascko), Lancaster University, the University of Liverpool, Oxford University, Sheffield University, Warwick University, Queen Mary University of London, and the STFC’s Rutherford Appleton and Daresbury Laboratories.

Dr Wascko said “It’s a testament to the wisdom of the prize committee to award it to all these experiments, because some of the experiments discovered new characteristics of neutrinos, and others confirmed them and worked out exactly what was happening. The experiments all use different energies and distances, from a few kilometres to the distance from the Sun to the Earth. All these point to the same picture: everything is unified and everything agrees."

Professor Dave Wark from STFC started the T2K project in the UK and has led the UK group since its beginning, said: ‘It is very satisfying to see our hard work on T2K recognised, but our observations are just the start, really. These observations open the doors to a whole new set of tools to probe the universe at the smallest scales. We are already building new experiments to use them.'

The great success of the research at SNO has since led to the creation of a larger SNOLAB underground facility in Canada, which is now home to numerous other experiments. The SNO detector itself has been upgraded and re-purposed to become the SNO+ project.

Similarly, the success of T2K now opens the way to further neutrino experiments, such as Hyper Kamiokande in Japan and DUNE in the US. In all cases, the UK and STFC continues to play a leading role in one of the most exciting areas of scientific research.

Other recipients of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize, in addition to SNO and T2K, include the K2K, KamLAND, Daya Bay and Super Kamiokande experiments for their studies of neutrino oscillations.

These collaborations will share the $3 million prize money, which was awarded last night at a ceremony at the NASA Ames Research Centre in Moffett Field, California. Founded by Russian entrepreneur, venture capitalist and physicist Yuri Milner, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics recognises individuals who have made profound contributions to human knowledge.

Notes to Editors:

Neutrinos are among the most fundamental and enigmatic particles in nature. They are produced in basic nuclear reactions, such as those that power the Sun, from which there are about a hundred billion neutrinos passing through an area the size of a thumbnail every second. Neutrinos interact with matter extremely weakly, which means they easily pass through the Earth, making them very difficult to detect. Yet, despite their ethereal nature, we know they are crucial to the very fabric of the universe. It has even been proposed that the peculiar properties of neutrinos may hold the key to understanding how matter survived the traumatic birth of the universe to make our existence possible.

There are three distinct varieties, or ‘flavours’, of neutrino, named after the types of particle they can produce when interacting: electron neutrino, muon neutrino and tau neutrino. Strangely, it has been found that these neutrinos exist as mixtures of mass states, not possessing a single well-defined value. An odd consequence of this is that one flavour can transform, or ‘oscillate’, into other flavours as it travels. These properties place neutrinos beyond the framework of the standard model of particle physics, meaning they require modifications to existing theory.

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The 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics

The Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics recognizes major insights into the deepest questions of the Universe.

The Breakthrough Prizes were founded by Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki, Jack Ma and Cathy Zhang, Yuri and Julia Milner, and Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan. The prizes aim to celebrate scientists and generate excitement about the pursuit of science as a career. Breakthrough Prizes are funded by a grant from Sergey Brin and Anne Wojcicki's foundation, The Brin Wojcicki Foundation; a grant from Mark Zuckerberg’s fund at the Silicon Valley Community Foundation; a grant from Jack Ma Foundation; and a grant from Milner Foundation. Laureates of all prizes are chosen by Selection Committees, which are comprised of prior recipients of the prizes.

Laureates of each prize are chosen by its respective Selection Committee, comprised of previous recipients of the prize.

University of Oxford Department of Physics

SNOLAB is an underground science laboratory specializing in neutrino and dark matter physics. Located 2 km below the surface in the Vale Creighton Mine located near Sudbury Ontario Canada, SNOLAB is an expansion of the existing facilities constructed for the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO) solar neutrino experiment.

T2K (Tokai to Kamioka) is a long-baseline neutrino experiment in Japan, and is studying neutrino oscillations. The T2K experiment sends an intense beam of muon neutrinos from Tokai, which is on the east coast of Japan, to Kamioka at a distance of 295 km in western Japan. The neutrino beam is made in collisions between a proton beam and a graphite target; these collisions produce pions, which quickly decay to muons and muon neutrinos.