PNNL researchers part of 2016 Breakthrough Prize

Six Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researchers were among about 270 researchers honored with the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the same research project that won this year’s Nobel prize in physics.

The lead researcher of the collaboration, Queen’s University professor emeritus Arthur McDonald, represented the body of work in receiving the Nobel prize.

But for this prize, all of the researchers were honored “for the fundamental discovery of neutrino oscillations, revealing a new frontier beyond, and possibly far beyond, the standard model of particle physics.”

They are laboratory fellows Andrew Hime and Dick Kouzes, along with researchers Brent VanDevender, John Orrell, Allan Myers and Bryan Fulsom. All continue to work on a variety of physics questions.

“This is a wonderful achievement for the physicists at PNNL who support several of DOE’s core missions, including fundamental physics,” said Lou Terminello, who is the acting associate laboratory director for the Physical and Computational Sciences Directorate.

Physicist Andrew Hime is the PNNL researcher most closely connected to Sudbury Neutrino Observatory or SNO, a detector built in a deep underground mine in Canada.

He started working on SNO at Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1991 and built up a vital SNO research group. Although SNO’s detector stopped collecting data in 2006, researchers are still using the data to learn new things.

“SNO definitively showed that neutrinos born in the sun changed their identity en route to the earth, a discovery that, in concert with other experiments sharing the Breakthrough prize, implies that neutrinos have non-zero rest masses,” Hime said.

This story was originally published November 13, 2015 at 5:40 PM with the headline "PNNL researchers part of 2016 Breakthrough Prize."