Abstract
Ever since it was first proposed [1], the neutrino has played crucial roles from time to time in the advancement of our understanding of particle physics. The history around the neutrino and how it has contributed to the development of the particle theory are fascinating and instructive. In this book, however, we describe the material in a logical way, attaching little weight to the historical account. Therefore, we present in this chapter a brief historical account to partially compensate for this.
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The state that precedes the discovery of Chadwick was confusing. In early days the βspectrum was thought to be monoenergetic [3] like the αspectrum, and then to be a set of monoenergetic lines [4,5]. The experiments those days used photographic plates to detect electrons which were let pass through a slit into a space where a magnetic field perpendicular to the βrays was applied, serving as a spectrometer [3]. It was not easy to recognise the continuum components with the photographic technique, while discrete lines, which originated from internal conversion of γrays (the effect identified later by Ellis (1921) [6]), were easily detected. Chadwick (worked in Berlin with Geiger) used a counter technique to measure the electron flux.
See the analysis by Brown [15] for a different view.
The path was in fact not so straight. Most beta decays studied in the early days were those derived from the uranium and thorium sequences, and they are mostly forbidden transitions. Therefore, the interpretation of the spectrum was not obvious. For instance, Konopinski and Uhlenbeck [26] introduced derivative interactions to account for spectral distortion for some beta rays. It is after many experiments with artificial radioactivity and in particular after clear understanding of forbidden transitions (see below) that this statement is firmly established.
In retrospect there had been very early experiments that observed longitudinal polarisation of electrons emitted in beta decay [39], but nobody, including the authors themselves, apparently had connected their results with parity violation. This was just not the right time (see [40]). Experimentally, the first reference to parity violation was made in [41] to explain Λ ’ pπ decay, and the conclusion was postponed.
The converse is not true; a two component formalism is possible for massive fields.
Calculations based on the Fermi theory were made by Fierz (1936) [72] and by Tomonaga and Tamaki (1937) [73].
Earlier reference to this experiment is seen in his letter to Klein in 1931 [83].
The work in Japan during the wartime had seldom been appreciated in the West, so it had been somewhat decoupled from the mainstream progress of particle theory. This two-meson theory is an example: it was rediscovered by Marshak and Bethe (1947) [113] after the discovery of σ ’ μdecay.
The same remark as in the previous footnote also applies here. This work had not been appreciated in the West.
We refer the reader to the monograph by Bahcall for a detailed account of the solar neutrino problem up to 1994 [210].
There is a recent suggestion that a small Dirac mass of neutrinos may be explained within a higher-dimensional brane world [238]. The theory is still too premature to take it as a realistic possibility.
We refer to a review by Dolgov and Zeldovich [245] and a monograph by Kolb and Turner [246].
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© 2003 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Fukugita, M., Yanagida, T. (2003). Historical Introduction. In: Physics of Neutrinos. Texts and Monographs in Physics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05119-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-05119-1_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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