AKIPRESS.COM - Canadian physicist Arthur B. McDonald has won the Nobel Prize for discoveries about the behaviour of a mysterious solar particle, teased from an experiment buried two kilometres below Sudbury.

The Queen’s University professor emeritus was honoured for co-discovering that elusive particles known as neutrinos can change their identity — or “oscillate” — as they travel from the sun. It proved that neutrinos must have mass, a finding that upset the Standard Model of particle physics and opened new avenues for research into the fundamental properties of the universe, reports The Star.

McDonald, 72, shares the prize with Takaaki Kajita, whose Japanese collaboration made the same discovery with slightly different methods.

To measure solar neutrinos, McDonald and a 130-person international team built a massive detector in an operational copper mine southwest of Sudbury. The location allowed the experiment to be highly sensitive but created enormous logistical challenges. Construction on the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory — SNO — began in 1990. The experiment collected its first data nine years later.

“I think we all knew that if we could manage to do it, it would be a very significant measurement. And that’s the way it turned out,” McDonald said Tuesday, 10 “crazy” hours after he was awakened by a telephone call from Sweden telling him he had won the prize in physics.

SNO has since expanded to become SNOLAB, with more particle experiments underway.

“What we’re really pleased about is that we are able to do experiments that can give Canadians and our international collaborators, particularly the young people, a real eureka moment.”