Los Alamos and the Neutrino - a special retrospective celebrating 60 years of neutrino detection
Keith Rielage, P-23
Sixty years ago, Fred Reines and Clyde Cowan announced the discovery of
the neutrino. Wolfgang Pauli first hypothesized this elusive particle
in 1930. In 1951, Reines and Cowan started Project Poltergeist here at
Los Alamos to provide proof of its existence. The team took data at the
reactor in Hanford, WA but could not definitively prove they had detected
neutrinos over their backgrounds. In 1955, they took data at the new
Savannah River reactor and by June 1956 had the evidence they needed.
Since then Los Alamos, first as LASL and now as LANL, has been heavily
involved in neutrino detection and determining its properties. From the
initial detection, to the discovery of neutrino oscillations, and the
search for its mass, Los Alamos has been involved for the last six
decades. This colloquium will explore Project Poltergeist, an experiment
that could have occurred "only at Los Alamos", and touch on many of the
contributions of scientists at the lab to the detection of neutrinos.