Sanford Lab Science Director to speak at first-ever Nobel Day in Lead

Every Dec. 10, the Nobel Foundation presents the Nobel Prizes at an elaborate event in Stockholm, Sweden. This year, the Sanford Underground Research Facility (Sanford Lab) will join the celebration with the first “Nobel Day.” The event, presented in conjunction with the Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center, will be held Thursday, Dec. 10, at the Visitor Center, 160 W. Main St., in Lead, S.D.

Dr. Jaret Heise, Science Director at Sanford Lab, worked with Dr. Arthur B. McDonald, who shared this year’s Nobel Prize in Physics with Dr. Takaaki Kajita, for more than a decade. As the featured speaker for Nobel Day, Heise will discuss his work at SNOLAB and how it relates to past and current research at Sanford Lab. 

Since 1901, the Nobel Prize in Physics has been awarded 109 times to 201 laureates. Thirty-two were shared by two laureates and 30 were shared by three laureates. The youngest Nobel Laureate in physics was William Lawrence Bragg, who was 25 when he received the prestigious award in 1915. The oldest was Raymond Davis Jr., whose groundbreaking solar neutrino experiment at Homestake Gold Mine earned him the prize in 2002 when he was 88 years old. The Nobel Prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden.

Kajita, who is with the University of Tokyo and works with the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan, and McDonald, who is with Queen’s University in Canada and lead the Sudbury Neutrino Oscillation experiment at SNOLAB, received their Nobel for the “discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows neutrinos have mass.”

Through their discovery of the "chameleon-like" nature of neutrinos, Takaaki and McDonald solved a long-standing puzzle in particle physics and proved Davis’s results were correct. "The discovery has changed our understanding of the innermost workings of matter and can prove crucial to our view of the universe," the Academy said.

Nobel Day begins at 5 p.m. with a social and is free to the public (donations to support education events at the Visitor Center are welcome). Heise’s presentation begins at 6 p.m. Video of the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony in Sweden will be available on televisions throughout the Visitor Center exhibit area. Light refreshments will be served. Guests aged 21 and older may sample craft brews by Crow Peak Brewery.

Sanford Lab is operated by the South Dakota Science and Technology Authority (SDSTA). The mission of the SDSTA is to advance compelling underground, multidisciplinary research in a safe work environment and to inspire and educate through science, technology, and engineering. For more information about Sanford Lab, please visit www.SanfordLab.org.

For more information about the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony visit  www.nobelprize.org. 

For more information about Sanford Lab Homestake Visitor Center visit http://sanfordlabhomestake.com