Soo-Bong Kim is a South Korean physicist.

Education

Kim was born and raised in

Busan Busan (), officially Busan Metropolitan City, is South Korea's second list of cities in South Korea by population, most populous city after Seoul, with a population of over 3.3 million as of 2024. Formerly romanized as Pusan, it is the economi ...

South Korea South Korea, officially the Republic of Korea (ROK), is a country in East Asia. It constitutes the southern half of the Korea, Korean Peninsula and borders North Korea along the Korean Demilitarized Zone, with the Yellow Sea to the west and t ...

. 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 public university, public research university in Seoul, South Korea. It is one of the SKY (universities), SKY universities and a part of the Flagship Korean National Universities. The university's main c ...

. He received his Ph.D. from the

University of Pennsylvania The University of Pennsylvania (Penn or UPenn) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. One of nine colonial colleges, it was chartered in 1755 through the efforts of f ...

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 The University of Michigan (U-M, U of M, or Michigan) is a public university, public research university in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. Founded in 1817, it is the oldest institution of higher education in the state. The University of Mi ...

before moving to

Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...

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 field. This coupling 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 in Batavia, Illinois, near Chicago, is a United States Department of Energy United States Department of Energy National Labs, national laboratory specializing in high-energy particle phys ...

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

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

fermion In particle physics, a fermion is a subatomic particle that follows Fermi–Dirac statistics. Fermions have a half-integer spin (spin 1/2, spin , Spin (physics)#Higher spins, spin , etc.) and obey the Pauli exclusion principle. These particles i ...

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 an elementary particle that interacts via the weak interaction and gravity. The neutrino is so named because it is electrically neutral and because its rest mass is so small ('' -ino'') that i ...

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 in 1604. Light and neutrinos f ...

and jointly discovered the

neutrino oscillations Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanical phenomenon in which a neutrino created with a specific lepton family number ("lepton flavor": electron, muon, or tau) can later be measured to have a different lepton family number. The probability o ...

using the Super-Kamiokande detector in 1998. He then joined the effort of measuring

neutrino oscillation Neutrino oscillation is a quantum mechanics, quantum mechanical phenomenon in which a neutrino created with a specific lepton lepton number, family number ("lepton flavor": electron, muon, or tau lepton, tau) can later be Quantum measurement, mea ...

s using a neutrino beam produced by an accelerator. As a member of the K2K (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. It is the county seat and most populous city of Washoe County, Nevada, Washoe County. Sitting in the High Eastern Sierra foothills, ...

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 () 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 neutrino physics, which was Pontecorvo's principal research field, ...

with

Wang Yifang Wang Yifang (; born February 1963) 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 physics, in pa ...

and Kōichirō Nishikawa. 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 ...

for natural science. In 2020, Kim was given the

Ho-Am Prize in Science The Ho-Am Prize in Science was established in 1990 by Kun-Hee Lee, the Chairman of Samsung, to honour the late Chairman, Lee Byung-chul, the founder of the company. The Ho-Am Prize in Science (previously the Ho-Am Prize in Science & Technology) ...

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