Takaaki Kajita  Guest Professor

 Nobel Laureate in Physics (2015)

Experience and achievements：

Prof. Kajita is a principal investigator at the Institute for the Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo, and director of Institute for Cosmic Ray Research, University of Tokyo. In 2015, he shared the Nobel Prize in Physics with Canadian physicist Arthur McDonald for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.

Prof. Kajita has been working in Kamiokande and Super-Kamiokande experiments. In particular, he has been studying atmospheric neutrinos and neutrino oscillations. In 1988, they discovered theatmospheric neutrino anomaly.In this study,theyshowed that the nm/ne ratio observed in Kamiokande was only about 60% of the predicted ratio.Subsequently, in 1994, they discovered that the atmospheric muon-neutrino deficit depends on the zenith-angle or equivalently on the neutrino flight length, which was another indication for the neutrino oscillations. In 1996, the Super-Kamiokande experiment started. In 1998, by the study of the high statistics data from Super-Kamiokande, they concluded that the observed atmospheric muon-neutrino deficit was due to neutrino oscillations.

Research field：

Neutrino physics