INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE
ON NEUTRINO PHYSICS
AND ASTROPHYSICS 1972–2022
Stephen Parke
Neutrino ’72 had two exceptional aspects: first, it was the dawn of the Glashow–Weinberg–Salam era where neutrino physics was of paramount importance for the discovery of a new weak force of Nature, mediated by the Z0 boson, and unified the weak and electromagnet-ic interactions. This lead to the SU(3)×SU(2)×U(1) gauge theory of the Standard Model, a monumental step in our understanding of Strong, Weak and Electro-magnetic Interactions. Second, this conference launched what is now the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics Series, a conference dedicated to the Neutrino.
In June of 2022, the 50th anniversary of Neutrino ’72, thirty such Neutrino Conferences will have been held in locations in Europe, North America and Asia/ Oceania. George Marx, as founder of this series, pre-sided over the first twenty of these meetings. Many important results in neutrino physics have been re-ported at one of these conferences. Ray Davis and John Bahcall frequently reported on the updated measurements and calculations, respectively, of the solar neutrino flux puzzle. Other examples are the definitive discovery of neutrino oscillations by Super-KamiokaNDE at the 18th conference in 1998 and the SNO results on solar neutrinos fluxes at the 20th con-ference in 2002.
Participants of Neutrino ’72 conference. In the front row: T. D. Lee, G. L. Radicati, R. P. Feynman, B. Pontecorvo, G. Marx, V. F. Weisskopf, F. Reines, C. L. Cowan and P. Budini
These discoveries were honored with the 2015 Nobel prize. There have been many other important results re-ported over the years, too numerous to list here. At the last in person meeting of this conference series there were more than 800 registered participants. An astonishing number given that this is a plenary only conference in an age of parallel conferences. The covid pandemic disrupted Neutrino 2020 so that it was a purely online meeting with even a much larger number of online participants.
Stephen Parke, Distinguished Scientist at the Theoretical Physics Department of Fermi National Laboratory, Batavia, USA; Chair of the International Neutrino Committee
The 50th anniversary meeting, Neutrino 2022 to be held in Seoul, South Korea, could be an in-person, hybrid or purely on-line. Neutrino 2030 will celebrate the 100th anniversary of Wolfgang Pauli’s hypothesis that there exists alight neutral lepton, the neutrino. The International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics Series launched and nurtured by George Marx has become the premier international neutrino conference where diversity, inclusiveness and transparency are recognized as of essential importance for great discoveries. To end, I quote Isaac Asimov from his popular book titled, The Neutrino (1966), “And yet the nothing particle is not a nothing at all,” yet in 1966 only a very, very tiny piece of the neutrino puzzle was known. There is still much more for all of us to discover about the neutrino’s nature and its role in shaping the Universe. Thank you, George
The 50th Anniversary Committee
| Name | Institution |
|---|---|
| Francis Halzen | UW-Madison |
| Cecilia Jarlskog | Lund University |
| Takaaki Kajita | Univ. of Tokyo |
| Konrad Kleinknecht | Univ. of Mainz |
| John Learned | Univ. of Hawaii |
| Art McDonald | Queen's University |
| Jorge Morfin | Fermilab |
| Andras Patkos | Eötvös Loránd University |
| Stephen Parke | Fermilab |
| Henry Sobel | UC-Irvine |
| Yoichiro Suzuki | Univ. of Tokyo |
