"I have done a terrible thing:  I have postulated a particle that cannot be detected.." Wolfgang Pauli  (Dec. 1930).

Pauli was definitely too harsh on himself. The fact that three  conserved quantity would otherwise be missingin beta-decay  (energy, linear momentum and angular momentum) would now be considered a definite proof of something otherwise undetected.  Pauli had proposed to call the new particle  "neutron" because it had no electrical charge but that name would soon be preemptedby James Chadwick(1891-1974; Nobel 1935)  for the massive nuclear particle hediscovered in 1932, which now stands.

The particle postulated by Pauli was given its final name of neutrino (Italian for "little neutron")  by Enrico Fermi (1901-1954) who first used the name in public at a meeting in Paris (July 1932)  following a suggestion made jokinglyin a friendly conversation with another Italian physicist Edoardo Amaldi (1908-1989) in the wake of Chadwick's aforementioned discovery of the neutron.

G_F / ( c) ³  =  1.1663787  GeV^-2

In 1942, Wang Ganchang (1907-1998) had suggested that reverse  beta capture  could provide an experimentalway to detect the influx of antineutrinos from a nearby nuclear reactor,  through the reaction:

_e  +  p⁺        n  +  e⁺

It would take another  14  years to actually make such a detection, which earned the surviving experimenter (Reines) a belated Nobel prize in 1995.

In a supernova,  a huge number of neutrinos aretypically observed several hours before the explosion can be detected optically. This was first noticed  (after the fact) in the case of SN1987A, a naked-eye supernova from the Large Magellanic Cloud whose light first reached us on 1987-02-23.

Now,  a system of neutrino detectors is in place (SNEWS) to provide early-warning directional information to all observatories a few hours before the the next nearby supernova  becomes visible... We don't want to miss it!

The Wu experiment.

Lederman andSteinberger attended the Stanford meeting of the APS in December 1957, where Feynman and Gell-Mann reported on their joint work

As a student ofJulian Schwinger (1918-1994;Nobel 1965) Sheldon Glashow (b. 1932)  originallycame up with the idea which eventually led to our current understanding of the weak force with three intermediatevector bosons  (massive bosons of spin 1)  besides the photon,  usingYang-Mills theory. Two of opposite unit charge  (W- and W+)  and a neutral one  (Z). It wasn't yet clear at this point how this would account for the observed strangeness-changing  properties of weak interactions.

In Paris,  in 1959, Glashow talked about that to Gell-Mann, who reformulated the idea and reported on it at the Rochester conference of 1960. The problem was then to generalize Yang-Mills theory beyond the SU(2) of isospin. It took a young assistant professor of mathematics at Caltech  (Dick Bloch)   to point out to Gell-Mann,  in the Fall of 1960,  that simple Lie groups had alreadybeen classified before SU(3) appeared as the next logical choice for such a generalization,

Production of Solar Neutrinos :

Bruno Pontecorvo (1913-1993) was the youngest of Fermi's Via Panisperna boys.

Willy Fowler(1911-1995;Nobel 1983)and John McCool at Caltech.

The Standard solar model John Bahcall.

The cross-section of a neutrino is a rapidly-increasing function of its energy.

The Homestake Experiment :

In 1948, Ray Davis  was a chemist  working forBrookhaven National Laboratory on Long Island, NY.  He set up the Homestake experiment using 100,000 gallon tank of perchlorethylene (dry-cleaning fluid)  4580 ft underground in a South Dakota gold mine.Over the course of several decades,  the experiment consistently detected about 1/3 of the neutrinoflux predicted by the Standard solar model.

Herb Chen (1942-1987).Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO).