Dave Wark

Title

Neutrino Physics – Past, Present, and Future

Abstract

The neutrino was born 80 years ago at ETH with Wolfgang Pauli’s famous letter outlining a "desperate remedy" to save the conservation of energy and momentum. He proposed the existence of a previously unknown new particle (at the time only two were known – the electron and the proton), which Fermi then dubbed the neutrino. Pauli subsequently apologized for proposing something which could not be directly observed (if only theorists had such concerns today!), but he lived to be proven wrong on that point, as we have now detected neutrinos from reactors, accelerators, the sun, cosmic ray interactions in the atmosphere, and even from a supernova. These measurements have revealed some surprising properties of the neutrino, and new experiments under construction or planned could extend those surprises and perhaps even link the neutrino to one of the greatest mysteries in fundamental physics – where did the matter in the Universe come from?