Takaaki Kajita, Nobel Prize in Physics 2015

Takaaki Kajita (梶田 隆章, born 9 March 1959) is a Japanese physicist, known for neutrino experiments at the Kamiokande and its successor, Super-Kamiokande. In 2015, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Canadian physicist Arthur B. McDonald.

Early life and education

Kajita was born in 1959 in Higashimatsuyama, Saitama, Japan. He liked studying thought rather than memorizing, especially with interest in physics, organism, world history, Japanese history, and earth science in high school. He studied physics at the Saitama University and graduated in 1981. He received his doctorate in 1986 at the University of Tokyo. In UTokyo, he joined Masatoshi Koshiba's laboratory because they were "somehow interested".

Career and research

Since 1988 Kajita has been at the Institute for Cosmic Radiation Research, University of Tokyo, where he became an assistant professor in 1992 and professor in 1999.

He became director of the Center for Cosmic Neutrinos at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) in 1999. As of 2017, he is a Principal Investigator at the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo, and Director of ICRR.

In 1998, Kajita's team at the Super-Kamiokande found that when cosmic rays hit the Earth's atmosphere, the resulting neutrinos switched between two flavours before they reached the detector under Mt. Kamioka. This discovery helped prove the existence of neutrino oscillation and that neutrinos have mass. In 2015, Kajita shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Canadian physicist Arthur McDonald, whose Sudbury Neutrino Observatory discovered similar results.

Awards

• 1987 – Asahi Prize
• 1989 – Bruno Rossi Prize
• 1998 – Asahi Prize
• 1999 – Nishina Memorial Prize
• 2002 – Panofsky Prize
• 2010 – Yoji Totsuka Award
• 2012 – Japan Academy Prize
• 2013 – Julius Wess Award
• 2015 – Nobel Prize in Physics
• 2016 – Fundamental Physics Prize

Honors

• 2015 – Order of Culture, Person of Cultural Merit
• 2016 – Doctorate in Science (DSc), Aligarh Muslim University, India
• 2016 – Honoris Causa Degree, Higher University of San Andrés, La Paz, Bolivia.
• 2017 – Honoris Causa Degree in Physics, University of Naples Federico II
• 2017 – Honoris Causa Degree in Physics, University of Bern