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Early nuclear researchers found that beta particles didn’t have enough energy. Conservation laws of momentum and energy indicated that energy was going missing. Beta particles were also produced with a wide range of energies. Wolfgang Pauli proposed an explanation in 1930. He suggested that beta radiation consisted of two particles, and not just one. The second particle needed to be small, fast, and neutral – making it almost impossible to detect. The second particle was later named the neutrino. It contains large amounts of energy and momentum, but is almost massless. Its presence in beta decay explains where the “missing energy” goes. Pauli’s explanation was purely theoretical at first. Enrico Fermi took Pauli’s postulation and developed it to fully explain the energies of the particles in beta decay. The total energy of the neutrino and the beta particle is constant. The first neutrino interaction was observed in the 1950s.
Properties of neutrinos:
• almost massless
• travel at close to the speed of light
• neutral charge
• possess energy and momentum
• possess quantum spin
Beta decay is one source of neutrinos.
Another source of neutrinos is the nuclear fusion that occurs in our Sun. Every second, hundreds of billions of neutrinos pass through every square centimetre on Earth – without interacting at all!
Detection of Neutrinos
Because they are so small and are neutral, neutrinos are very hard to detect. Neutrino detectors are gigantic underground tanks full of water and photomultiplier tubes. They observe about one neutrino interaction a day.
