Timeline of Neutrino Physics
Ninety-five years from a desperate idea in a letter to a precision measurement. This overview brings together the stations that form the substructure for neutrinovoltaic technology — and shows how young this field still is: twenty-six years lay between the first conjecture and the first detection, forty-three between the prediction of coherent scattering and its measurement.
The foundations, 1930 to 1956
| Year | Station |
|---|---|
| 1930 | Wolfgang Pauli postulates, in his letter to the Tübingen radioactivity conference — addressed to "Dear radioactive ladies and gentlemen" — a neutral, barely interacting particle, in order to save the conservation of energy in beta decay. |
| 1934 | Enrico Fermi presents the first quantitative theory of beta decay and gives the particle its name: neutrino, the little neutral one. |
| 1937 | Ettore Majorana shows that a neutral fermion can be its own antiparticle — the question is open to this day. |
| 1956 | Clyde Cowan and Frederick Reines detect the antineutrino at the Savannah River reactor. Reines receives the Nobel Prize for it in 1995. |
The years of discovery, 1957 to 1998
| Year | Station |
|---|---|
| 1957 | Bruno Pontecorvo proposes that neutrinos might turn into one another — the idea of oscillation. |
| 1962 | Lederman, Schwartz and Steinberger show at Brookhaven that the muon neutrino is a particle in its own right. Nobel Prize 1988. |
| 1968 | Raymond Davis measures only about a third of the expected solar neutrinos in the Homestake mine. The solar neutrino problem begins. |
| 1974 | D. Z. Freedman predicts coherent elastic neutrino-nucleus scattering and writes at the same time that its detection will be difficult. He was to be proved right. |
| 1987 | Supernova SN 1987A delivers 24 neutrino events in thirteen seconds — three hours before the visible light. |
| 1989 | Measurements at LEP at CERN show: there are exactly three light neutrino kinds. |
| 1998 | Super-Kamiokande detects the oscillation of atmospheric neutrinos. The first hard evidence that neutrinos have mass. |
The oscillation years, 2001 to 2015
| Year | Station |
|---|---|
| 2001 | The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory solves the solar neutrino problem: the neutrinos are not missing, they have changed kind. |
| 2002 | KamLAND confirms this with reactor antineutrinos, turning an interpretation into a measurement. |
| 2010 | IceCube at the South Pole begins operation — a cubic kilometre of ice as a detector. |
| 2012 | Daya Bay determines the third mixing angle θ₁₃ and thereby opens the door to the question of CP violation. |
| 2015 | The Nobel Prize in Physics goes to Takaaki Kajita and Arthur B. McDonald. It is thereby official: neutrinos have mass — and carry momentum. |
The precision years, since 2015
| Year | Station |
|---|---|
| 2015 | Neutrino Deutschland GmbH files the first priority on 6 March, from which patent WO2016142056A1 later emerges. |
| 2016 | On 15 September the patent application is published: a metal film with a coating of graphene and silicon. |
| 2017 | The COHERENT collaboration measures coherent scattering — 43 years after Freedman's prediction, at 6.7 σ and with a detector of 14.6 kilograms. |
| 2020 | P. M. Thibado and co-workers show that freestanding graphene produces a measurable current from its own vibrations. Borexino measures the sun's CNO neutrinos. |
| 2022 | KATRIN pushes the mass bound below one electronvolt. COHERENT repeats the measurement with markedly better statistics. |
| 2024 | The master equation of Holger Thorsten Schubart is published — a framework bringing coherent scattering, the muon flux and electromagnetic and thermal contributions together in one expression for the output power. |
| 2025 | KM3NeT observes a neutrino at 220 PeV, the most energetic ever measured. The IceCube Upgrade lowers the detection threshold below 5 GeV. |
| 2026 | JUNO in China begins measurement operations with 20,000 tonnes of liquid scintillator. |
What is still to come
These entries are planned, not accomplished:
| Year | Project |
|---|---|
| 2027 | Hyper-Kamiokande is to receive its first beam — 258,000 tonnes of water as a detector. |
| 2030 | DUNE is to deliver its first neutrino data, over a distance of 1,300 kilometres. |
What the timeline shows
Three things stand out on reading it through.
The intervals are shrinking. From Pauli to Cowan and Reines 26 years passed, from Freedman to COHERENT 43. Between COHERENT and the measurement on a second nuclear material lay four. The field has gathered speed.
The three anchors of neutrinovoltaic technology lie close together. 2015 the proof of mass, 2017 the proof of momentum transfer, 2020 the proof of current from graphene vibrations. All three within five years — the preconditions for the approach have been complete only recently.
Prediction and measurement often lie decades apart. In this field that is normal and no objection: Pauli waited 26 years, Freedman 43, Pontecorvo 41. Anyone wanting to measure neutrinos needs patience and ever better detectors.
Related
- Neutrino oscillation — the phenomenon behind the years 1957 to 2015
- Nobel Prize in Physics 2015 — the award for it
- CEνNS — the process predicted in 1974
- The master equation — the 2024 entry
- Patent WO2016142056A1 — the 2015 and 2016 entries
Sources
- Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences: Scientific Background — Neutrino Oscillations (2015).
- D. Z. Freedman: Physical Review D 9, 1389 (1974).
- D. Akimov et al. (COHERENT): Science 357, 1123–1126 (2017); Physical Review Letters 129, 081801 (2022).
- P. M. Thibado et al.: Physical Review E 102, 042101 (2020).
- KM3NeT collaboration: Nature 638 (2025).
- WIPO: WO 2016/142056 A1, published 15 September 2016.
- Particle Data Group: Review of Particle Physics (2024).
- neutrino-research.com, Timeline of neutrino physics, retrieved 3 September 2026 — basis for dating the 2024 entry.