Short Bio

Francesco VISSANI works as a professor at GSSI. He is on temporary leave from the Gran Sasso National Laboratories of INFN, where he holds the position of Director of Research since 1999. Master in physics at the University of Pisa (1990). PhD in physics at the ISAS/SISSA (1994). First recipient of the Occhialini Medal of SIF-IOP (2008). He coordinated the PhD and the research area of Astroparticle Physics at GSSI from October 2012 to February 2018.

Abstract

In this seminar, the history of the neutrino and its mass is recounted in six short chapters, with a bit of emphasis on the theoretical aspects:

1. Pauli's proposal is presented, clarifying its significance and the context in which it arose, that of the earliest theories of the atomic nucleus.
2. The first beta-ray theory, due to Enrico Fermi, is described, clarifying its potential but also its formal and conceptual limitations.
3. Majorana's ideas, from which the modern treatment of neutrinos and fermions in general originated, are illustrated.
4. Major advances in the next 30 years concern the existence of fermion families and the chiral structure of weak interactions, directly related to the hypothesis of neutrinos with zero mass.
5. Conceptions on the mass of neutrinos and the main ways to probe them are then summarised.
6. Prospects for development are briefly discussed in the last chapter of the story, which is the one yet to be written.