Michael Aivazis edited neutrino_intro.tex  almost 10 years ago

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\section{Introduction}  In 1934, When when  the parts of the standard model were first being pieced together, Enrico Fermi introduced a massless particle called a neutrino that is fermionic in nature and does not ineract with baryonic matter, in order to explain how beta decay could convserve fundamental quantities (energy, spin, etc.) \cite{Wilson_1968} . \cite{Wilson_1968}.  For awhile, a while,  only electron neutrinos were thought to exist. However, fifty years later in 1988, Lederman, Schwartz, and Steinberger earned the Nobel Prize in physics for work they did in 1962 at the Alternating Gradient Synchotron at the Brookhaven National Laboratory. In their paper, the group from Columbia reported that they had found a second kind of neutrino that did not couple to the electron like the one proposed by Fermi, but instead to muons produced by their beam in upstate New York \cite{Danby_1962} . York\cite{Danby_1962}.  Another forty years passed before the third generation of neutrino was dicovered in 2000 by the DONUT collaboration at Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois \cite{Kodama_2001} . Illinois\cite{Kodama_2001}.  For a long while, these various "flavors" of neutrinos were thought to not couple with anything apart from their respective fermion. However, people reasoned that it wasn't impossible that these neutrinos could interact with other forms of matter.