Takaaki Kajita (?? ?? Kajita Takaaki, Japanese pronunciation: [kad?ita taka?

ki],
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.

Contents [hide]
1 Early and personal life
2 Career
3 Awards
4 Honors
5 See also
6 References
7 External links
Early and personal life[edit]
Kajita was born in 1959 in Higashimatsuyama, Saitama, Japan.[1] His wife, Michiko,
lives in Toyama.[2]

Career[edit]
Kajita studied at the Saitama University and graduated in 1981. He received his
doctorate in 1986 at the University of Tokyo.[2] Since 1988 he has been at the
Institute for Cosmic Radiation Research, University of Tokyo, where he became an
assistant professor in 1992 and professor in 1999.[3]

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.[4]

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.[2][5] 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.[5] Kajita's and McDonald's
work solved the longstanding Solar neutrino problem, which was a major discrepancy
between the predicted and measured Solar neutrino fluxes, and indicated that the
Standard Model, which required neutrinos to be massless, had weaknesses.[5] In a
news conference at the University of Tokyo, shortly after the Nobel announcement,
Kajita said, "I want to thank the neutrinos, of course. And since neutrinos are
created by cosmic rays, I want to thank them, too."[6]

One of the first people Kajita called after receiving the Nobel Prize was 2002
Nobel physics winner Masatoshi Koshiba, his former mentor and a fellow neutrino
researcher.[2]

Kajita is currently the principal investigator of another ICRR project located at

the Kamioka Observatory, the KAGRA gravitational wave detector.[7]

Awards[edit]
1987: Asahi Prize as part of Kamiokande (Representative: Masatoshi Koshiba)[8]
1989: Bruno Rossi Prize along with the other members of the Kamiokande
collaboration[9]
1998: Asahi Prize as part of Super-Kamiokande (Representative: Yoji Totsuka)[10]
1999: Nishina Memorial Prize[11]
2002: Panofsky Prize for compelling experimental evidence for neutrino oscillations
using atmospheric neutrinos[12]
2010: Yoji Totsuka Award[13]
2012: Japan Academy Prize for "Discovery of Atmospheric Neutrino Oscillations"[14]
[15]
2013: Julius Wess Award for his "significant role in the Discovery of Atmospheric
Neutrino Oscillations with the Super-KAMIOKANDE Experiment."[16]
2015: Nobel Prize in Physics jointly with Arthur B. McDonald for the discovery of
neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.[17]
2016: Fundamental Physics Prize[18]