Posts
Masatoshi Koshiba ’55 (PhD), who died November 12, received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics for detecting and measuring subatomic particles known as neutrinos by Lindsey Valich, Communications Officer, Science and Engineering at University of Rochester.
2002 Nobel Prize in Physics recipient Masatoshi Koshiba ’55 (PhD) talks with media in Tokyo after his prize was announced.
Photo: Associated Press photo
Rochester graduate Masatoshi Koshiba ’55 (PhD), a physicist who shared the 2002 Nobel Prize in Physics, passed away on November 12 at the age of 94.
Koshiba helped solve one of the great mysteries of 20th-century physics: detecting and measuring neutrinos, subatomic particles that are a byproduct of interstellar nuclear reactors such as the sun. Neutrinos are one of the most abundant particles in the universe, but they are sometimes referred to as “ghost particles” because, compared to other known subatomic particles, neutrinos rarely interact with atoms.
Rising to the challenge of measuring such elusive objects, in the 1980s, Koshiba spearheaded the development of the Kamiokande detector, a massive underground facility located in an abandoned mine in Japan. The detector’s water-filled apparatus is designed to catch neutrinos as they are emitted from the sun.
“Professor Koshiba led the development of the first large-scale detectors that opened up the field of neutrino astronomy,” says Kevin McFarland, the Dr. Steven Chu Professor of Physics. “In the years since, detectors have not only led to important observations about the universe, but they also made discoveries about the properties of neutrinos themselves.”...
Koshiba was born in Toyohashi in central Japan in 1926. He graduated from the University of Tokyo in 1951 and earned his PhD in physics from Rochester four years later. In 1970 he became professor of physics at his alma mater until 1987.
For the next decade he was a professor at Tokai University, and he worked as a senior counselor at the International Center for Elementary Particle Physics. Koshiba was awarded the Humboldt Prize in 1997 and, in 2000, he received the Wolf Prize in physics—an honor considered second only to the Nobel Prize in prestige. He returned to Rochester in 2000 to receive the Distinguished Scholar Award. In 2015, one of his protégées, Takaaki Kajita, won the Nobel prize in 2015 for one of the next generation neutrino projects.
Source: University of Rochester
