Neutrinos and nucleons

Measurements with neutrinos seemed impossible eight decades ago, but by 1974 the Gargamelle team had used them to reveal the quark structure of matter

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On 7 April 1934 the journal Nature published a paper in which Hans Bethe and Rudolf Peierls made a first calculation of the neutrino cross-section and concluded that “it seems highly improbable that, even for cosmic ray energies, the cross-section becomes large enough to allow the process to be observed”. Forty years on, neutrino cross-sections were not only being measured with the Gargamelle bubble chamber at CERN’s Proton Synchrotron, they were helping to reveal a more fundamental layer to nature – the quarks.

Read more: "Neutrinos and nucleons"CERN Courier