AMANDA test string proves feasibility of an in-ice neutrino detector In a 1991 Nature paper, Francis Halzen, Bob Morse, Buford Price, and other collaborators described the initial results of the AMANDA (Antarctic Muon And Neutrino Detector Array) project, which tested the feasibility of using ice to detect neutrinos with instruments deployed on the summit of […]
Timeline Slider
1975
First of a series of DUMAND workshops advances the concept of neutrino telescopes At the 1973 International Cosmic Ray Conference, a group of physicists including Frederick Reines, John Learned, Georgy Zatsepin, and Saburo Miyake founded a committee to explore the feasibility of DUMAND (Deep Underwater Muon and Neutrino Detector), a Markov-type instrument. In 1975, they […]
1969
Berezinsky, Zatsepin, Greisen, and Kuzmin propose cosmogenic neutrino production theory In 1969, Veniamin S. Berezinsky and Georgy T. Zatsepin suggested that it was possible to observe ultra-high-energy neutrinos known as cosmogenic neutrinos. By that time, Zatsepin, American physicist Kenneth I. Greisen, and Russian theorist and cosmologist Vadim A. Kuzmin had independently discovered an upper limit […]
1966
Lederman, Steinberger, and Schwartz et al. report the discovery of a second neutrino flavor American physicists Leon Lederman, Melvin Schwartz, and Jack Steinberger joined forces to search for another type of neutrino at Brookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, New York. At the time, only the electron neutrino was known. Their experiment shot a powerful […]
1962
Linsley detects first 1020 eV cosmic ray In the late 1950s, American physicist John Linsley worked with Livio Scarsi from the University of Milan to build an array of nineteen plastic scintillation detectors at Volcano Ranch near Albuquerque, New Mexico. On February 22, 1962, using these ground-based detectors, Linsley identified the first cosmic ray with […]
1960
Markov proposes installing neutrino detectors underwater At the 1960 Rochester Conference, Soviet physicist Moisey M. Markov proposed an idea “…to install detectors deep in a lake or a sea and to determine the direction of charged particles with the help of Cherenkov radiation.” This concept led to the series of underwater and in-ice telescopes that […]
1957
Pontecorvo predicts neutrino flavor oscillations Today, the idea of neutrino oscillations is indispensable to the field of neutrino physics. But in 1957, when it was first suggested by Italian physicist Bruno Pontecorvo, it was a wild notion. He thought that there was an analogy between leptons and hadrons and that neutrinos could oscillate in an […]
1956
Cowan and Reines et al. discover the neutrino experimentally During the 1950s, physicists Clyde L. Cowan and Frederick Reines conducted a series of experiments to detect the neutrino. They planned to do this using inverse beta decay (one of the interactions also seen by IceCube), in which a neutrino (more specifically an electron antineutrino) interacts […]
1933
Fermi develops his theory of weak interaction that includes the neutrino Italian physicist Enrico Fermi introduced the name “neutrino” in 1932 at a conference in Paris. Meaning “little neutral one” in Italian, “neutrino” was adopted to differentiate Pauli’s hypothesized “neutron” particle from a massive nuclear particle discovered by James Chadwick in 1932, which was also […]
1930
Pauli postulates hypothetical “neutron” particle Before 1930, there was a baffling issue in nuclear physics: a certain nuclear decay called beta decay appeared to lose energy, which contradicted the law of the conservation of energy. So Wolfgang Pauli, age 30, had the idea that maybe there was a lightweight particle produced in the decay that […]