CRI听力:Chinese Team Wins Breakthrough Prize for Neutrino Research

Wang Yifang, from the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, attended the award ceremony of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics at the NASA Ames Research Centre.

He is the director of the team behind China's Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino Experiment.

"I attribute this prize to the joint and relentless efforts of our team members. And a lot of hard work has been done in the past 30 years for China's high-energy physics to have today's achievements."
 
Established in 2006, the Daya Bay team discovered the value of the angle theta one-three, the last of three long-sought neutrino mixing angles, in 2012.

The groundbreaking achievement is based on analysis and measurements of how the oscillation process varies with neutrino energy by some 200 scientists from six countries and regions around the world.

Wang Yifang says the discovery is of great importance to neutrino research:

"This result laid a solid foundation for further research on cosmology and particle physics and provided a direction for further research on neutrino."

This is the first time that Chinese scientists have won the prize.

The prize is one of three awarded by the Breakthrough Foundation for outstanding contributions in life sciences, fundamental physics, and mathematics.

Russian entrepreneur and physicist Yuri Milner founded the Breakthrough Foundation.

He also awarded a three million U.S. dollars prize to the five winning teams.

Milner explains the rationale behind the sum of money offered as a prize by the foundation.

"It is a big enough number to send the message to the world that science is important. We need to keep in mind that the kind of scientists that are getting those prizes, they don't have the ability to use any intellectual property, because discovery belongs to everyone, from the time it's been discovered. So we made it so that everything that the scientists discover belongs to everyone, that's why they usually don't make a lot of money. "

The other four teams honored are KamLand, K2K/T2K, and Super-Kamiokande from Japan, as well as the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory from Canada.

For CRI, I'm Victor Ning.