Soo-Bong Kim is a South Korean physicist.

Education

Kim was born and raised in

Busan Busan (), officially known as is South Korea's most populous city after Seoul, with a population of over 3.4 million inhabitants. Formerly romanized as Pusan, it is the economic, cultural and educational center of southeastern South Korea, w ...

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia, constituting the southern part of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and sharing a Korean Demilitarized Zone, land border with North Korea. Its western border is formed ...

. He attended Dongrae High School, graduating in the class of 1979. Kim then graduated in 1983 and obtained his MS degree from

Seoul National University Seoul National University (SNU; ) is a national public research university located in Seoul, South Korea. Founded in 1946, Seoul National University is largely considered the most prestigious university in South Korea; it is one of the three "S ...

. He received his Ph.D. from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (also known as Penn or UPenn) is a private research university in Philadelphia. It is the fourth-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and is ranked among the highest-regarded universitie ...

in 1989. Kim's Ph.D. thesis was supervised by Alfred K. Mann and resulted in real-time and directional measurement of solar neutrinos in the Kamiokande-II detector and search for short-time variation.

Work

Kim was a postdoctoral fellow and a research investigator at the

University of Michigan , mottoeng = "Arts, Knowledge, Truth" , former_names = Catholepistemiad, or University of Michigania (1817–1821) , budget = $10.3 billion (2021) , endowment = $17 billion (2021)As o ...

before moving to

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts. The university is nonsectarian, but has a historical affiliation with the United Methodist Church. It was founded in 1839 by Methodists with its original campu ...

in 1996. He took up his current position at Seoul National University in 1998. He jointly led the efforts of discovering the

top quark The top quark, sometimes also referred to as the truth quark, (symbol: t) is the most massive of all observed elementary particles. It derives its mass from its coupling to the Higgs Boson. This coupling y_ is very close to unity; in the Standard ...

in 1994 and measuring its mass in 1995 using the

Fermilab Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab), located just outside Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle physics. Since 2007, Fermilab has been operat ...

Tevatron The Tevatron was a circular particle accelerator (active until 2011) in the United States, at the Fermilab, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (also known as ''Fermilab''), east of Batavia, Illinois, and is the second highest energy particle ...

hadron collider as a member of the CDF collaboration. The top quark was the heaviest fundamental

fermion In particle physics, a fermion is a particle that follows Fermi–Dirac statistics. Generally, it has a half-odd-integer spin: spin , spin , etc. In addition, these particles obey the Pauli exclusion principle. Fermions include all quarks an ...

yet to be observed before the experiment. The observation and mass measurement of the particle opened a new field of "top quark physics". Kim received his Ph.D. degree in 1989, based on the successful measurement of solar

neutrino A neutrino ( ; denoted by the Greek letter ) is a fermion (an elementary particle with spin of ) that interacts only via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass ...

s using the Kamiokande-II detector, which confirmed the existence of the

solar neutrino problem The solar neutrino problem concerned a large discrepancy between the flux of solar neutrinos as predicted from the Sun's luminosity and as measured directly. The discrepancy was first observed in the mid-1960s and was resolved around 2002. The fl ...

. He participated in the historical and first observation of neutrino burst from the

Supernova 1987A SN 1987A was a type II supernova in the Large Magellanic Cloud, a dwarf satellite galaxy of the Milky Way. It occurred approximately from Earth and was the closest observed supernova since Kepler's Supernova. 1987A's light reached Earth on Febr ...

and jointly discovered the neutrino oscillations using the Super-Kamiokande detector in 1998. He then joined the effort of measuring neutrino oscillations using a neutrino beam produced by an accelerator. As a member of the

K2K The K2K experiment (KEK to Kamioka Observatory, Kamioka) was a List of neutrino experiments, neutrino experiment that ran from June 1999 to November 2004. It used muon neutrinos from a well-controlled and well-understood particle beam, beam to veri ...

(KEK-to-Kamioka) collaboration in 2004, he measured one of the neutrino mixing angles. Kim started construction of a neutrino detector facility, near a nuclear power plant in Korea, to measure the last unknown neutrino mixing angle in 2006, and completed it in early 2011. He has been leading data collection for the

RENO Reno ( ) is a city in the northwest section of the U.S. state of Nevada, along the Nevada-California border, about north from Lake Tahoe, known as "The Biggest Little City in the World". Known for its casino and tourism industry, Reno is the c ...

experiment since August 1, 2011 using the facility.

Awards

Kim and all the members of Kamiokande-II collaboration received Asahi Prize in 1988 and the American Astronomy Society's Bruno Rossi Prize in 1989Bruno Rossi Prize 1989 Bruno Rossi Prize for the detection of a neutrino burst from the Supernova SN1987A. He shared the Asahi Prize in 1999 with Super-Kamiokande collaboration for the observation of atmospheric neutrino oscillation. In 2016, he shared the

Bruno Pontecorvo Prize The Bruno Pontecorvo Prize (russian: Премия имени Бруно Понтекорво) is an award for elementary particle physics, established in 1995 by the JINR in Dubna to commemorate Bruno Pontecorvo. The prize is mainly given for neut ...

with

Wang Yifang Wang Yifang (; born February 1963 in Jiangsu) is a Chinese particle and accelerator physicist. He is director of the Institute of High Energy Physics (IHEP) of the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing and known for contributions to neutrino ph ...

and

Kōichirō Nishikawa Kōichirō Nishikawa ( ja, 西川公一郎, born 1949 - November 28, 2018) was a Japanese elementary particle physicist, known for contributions to neutrino physics. He was professor emeritus of the KEK high-energy physics laboratory and Kyōto ...

. Kim was selected as one of world highly cited 5,000 researchers (HCR) by the ISI. He won the 1st Seoul National University's Academic Research Excellence Prize in 2008. In 2014, Kim was given the

Kyung-Ahm Prize The Kyung-Ahm Prize is a series of awards presented annually from the Kyung-Ahm Education & Cultural Foundation. Founded in 2005 with a 100 billion KRW endowment by Geum-Jo Song, the award originally had four categories and in addition to the aw ...

for natural science.

Technical reports

* "Indication of Electron Neutrino Appearance from an Accelerator-produced Off-axis Muon Neutrino Beam", ''Physical Review Letters'' 107, 041801 (2011)

References

External links