China's Daya Bay collaboration and the RENO collaboration of South Korea, were awarded the 2023 High Energy and Particle Physics Prize of the European Physical Society at a ceremony in Hamburg, Germany on Aug. 21.
Prof. WANG Yifang, initiator of the experiment and current director of the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, accepted the award on behalf of Daya Bay collaboration.
The citation noted that the prize was awarded for the observation of short baseline reactor electron-antineutrino disappearance, providing the first determination of the neutrino mixing angle theta 13, which paves the way for the detection of CP violation in the lepton sector.
The Daya Bay and RENO collaborations shared the award, which was conferred during the 2023 European Physical Society High Energy Physics Conference, with Swedish scientist Cecilia Jarlskog, who was honored for the discovery of an invariant measure of CP violation in both quark and lepton sectors.
The Daya Bay Experiment announced the discovery of a new pattern of neutrino oscillation and measured the corresponding mixing angle theta 13 on March 8, 2012. The latter result was later confirmed by the RENO collaboration in South Korea.
This discovery is of great significance for understanding the complete picture of neutrino oscillation, understanding the "mystery of the disappearance of antimatter" in the universe, searching for and identifying cosmological and new physics models, and determining the future direction of neutrino research.
This achievement has received various important awards at home and abroad, including the Panofsky Prize, the Breakthrough Prize in Fundamental Physics, the Nikkei Asia Prize, the Pontecorvo Prize, the National Natural Science First Prize, and the Future Science Prize.
The High Energy and Particle Physics Prize is the highest award of the European Physical Society in the field of high energy and particle physics. It was established in 1989 and is awarded every two years to individuals or collaboration groups who have made outstanding contributions in the field of high energy physics experiments, theory, or technology. In the 17 awards that have been presented so far, a total of 34 individuals and six collaboration groups have been recognized. Among the individual winners, 12 have also received the Nobel Prize in Physics.
