50 years of neutrinos

On December 4 1930, Wolfgang Pauli addressed an "open letter" to Lise Meitner and others attending a physics meeting, suggesting the neutrino as a way out of the difficulties confronted in beta rays research, especially by the existence of a continuous beta spectrum. He proposed a new particle later called the neutrino. The prehistory leading up to Pauli's letter will be reviewed, as well as the later discovery of the electron-neutrino followed by the muon-neutrino. There are now believed to be three different types of neutrino and their anti-particles. Neutrinos have a spin 1/2; but only one spin component has been found in nature: neutrinos go forward as "left-handed" screws and anti-neutrinos as "right-handed" ones. A question still not convincingly resolved today is wether neutrinos have a mass different from zero and, if they do, what consequences this would have for the behaviour of neutrinos and for cosmology.