- What discrepancy in beta decay led Wolfgang Pauli to propose the neutrino in 1930?
- Why did Pauli himself doubt the neutrino could ever be detected?
- How did Reines and Cowan's liquid-scintillator detector confirm antineutrinos near the Savannah River reactor in 1956?
- What made the double flash of gamma rays the signature that proved a neutrino collision had occurred?
Neutrino Physics
Detection, oscillation, and properties of neutrinos.
- How do modern neutrino observatories like Super-Kamiokande use the Cherenkov effect to detect particles?
- Why did neutrino detectors in Japan and Ohio register a burst of particles three hours before the supernova's light arrived?
- How did the neutrino burst confirm decades of theoretical predictions about core-collapse supernovae?
- How did Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger manage to create a directed beam out of particles that barely interact with anything?
- What did the Brookhaven experiment reveal about the muon neutrino versus the electron neutrino?
- How did Frederick Reines and Clyde Cowan manage to detect a particle that barely interacts with anything?
- What assumption about neutrino mass did the Standard Model make before 1998, and why?
- How is the Super-Kamiokande detector built, and why is it buried a kilometre underground?
- What did it mean for atmospheric muon-neutrinos to 'oscillate' into tau-neutrinos as they passed through the Earth?
- Why does a particle's ability to oscillate between identities require it to have mass?
- Why did Raymond Davis Jr.'s solar neutrino experiment consistently detect only a third of the predicted count?
- What did Masatoshi Koshiba's detection of neutrinos from a 1987 supernova prove for the first time?
- Why did neutrino mass contradict the Standard Model's original predictions?
- What did the OPERA experiment initially claim about neutrinos traveling from CERN to Gran Sasso?
- What two equipment errors were eventually found to explain the anomalous timing?
- Why would faster-than-light neutrinos have threatened special relativity if the result had held up?
- Why can a particle only oscillate between flavours if it has mass?
- How did detectors buried underground manage to catch neutrinos changing flavour?
- What does a nonzero neutrino mass imply for physics beyond the Standard Model?