Measurement of the Weinberg angle in neutrino interactions

Neutrino physics with high energy neutrino beams has played a crucial role in establishing the Standard Model of the electroweak interaction, in particular with repeated measurements of increasing precision of the fundamental parameter sin² θ _W which defines the electroweak mixing. This paper relates the history of these measurements, from the discovery of the neutral current interaction in 1973 until the latest high precision measurements in the years 2000. The review discusses in chronological order the important experiments performed at CERN, Fermilab and Brookhaven during the last thirty years of the 20th century.