Experimental particle physicist Yifang Wang arrives at the 3rd Annual Breakthrough Prize Award Ceremony at NASA Ames Research Center. (Photo : Getty Images)
The jury of the International Bruno Pontecorvo prize awarded the Bruno Pontecorvo Prize for 2016 to Professor Wang Yifang for his outstanding contribution to both the study of neutrino oscillation phenomenon and the measurement of the Theta13 mixing angle in the Daya Bay Reactor Neutrino.
The prestigious Pontecorvo Prize was instituted in 1995 in the memory of Bruno Pontecorvo, an Italian nuclear physicist that authored numerous studies in high energy physics, especially on neutrinos. He is an early assistant to Enrico Fermi, an Italian physicist who created the world's first nuclear reactor.
Bruno is considered the "father of neutrino physics." The prize is awarded mainly for breakthrough experiments on neutrino physics.
The Pontecorvo Prize is awarded by the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research in Dubna, Russia.
Professor Wang is from the Institute of High Energy Physics and is the first Chinese scientist to win this award. He proposed the Daya Bay neutrino oscillation experiment in China.
Wang's proposal includes a detailed detector design and experimental plan in order to precisely measure Theta13, a neutrino mixing angle. He was elected co-spokesperson of the experiment after assembling its large international collaboration.
Besides the 2016 Pontecorvo Prize, Wang received multiple awards within the last three years, which includes the Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky Prize in Experimental Particle Physics in 2014, the Nikkei Asia Prize in 2015 and the Fundamental Physics Breakthrough Award in 2016.
Wang received the prize along with Professor Koichiro Nishikawa from KEK Japan and Professor Kim Soo-Bong from Seoul National University, South Korea. Nishikawa worked on the Tokai to Kamioka long baseline neutrino oscillation experiment and Soo-Bong worked on the Reactor Experiment for Neutrino Oscillations.
The prize list for the 2016 Bruno Pontecorvo Prize will be held in September this year. It was approved by the JINR Scientific Council at its 121st session on Feb. 24.
