Takaaki Kajita (梶田隆章, Kajita Takaaki, born in 1959) is a Japanese physicist, known for neutrino experiments at the Kamiokande and its successor Super-Kamiokande.

Kajita studied at the Saitama University (completion 1981) and received his doctorate in 1986 at the University of Tokyo. Since 1988 he has been at the Institute for Cosmic Radiation Research, University of Tokyo, where he was an assistant professor in 1992 and professor in 1999.

He became director of the Center for Cosmic Neutrinos at the Institute for Cosmic Ray Research (ICRR) in 1999. Today he is at the Kavli Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe in Tokyo and Director of ICRR.[1].

In 1988 he discovered with the Kamiokande team a deficit of muon neutrinos in atmospheric neutrinos, which they called "atmospheric neutrino anomaly" and 1998 on neutrino oscillations traced.
Awards

In 1989 he was awarded, along with the other members of the Kamiokande collaboration, the Bruno Rossi Prize and the 2002 Panofsky Prize.

In 1987 he was awarded the Asahi Prize, also as part of Kamiokande, and 1999 this time as part of Superkamiokande.

In 1999 followed the Nishina Memorial Prize and in 2013 the Julius Wess Award.

In 2015 he received the Nobel Prize for Physics jointly with Arthur B. McDonald for the discovery of neutrino oscillations, which shows that neutrinos have mass.[2]

References

Geschichte des ICRR, 2012
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/2015/

Physicists

Physics Encyclopedia