Neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light
23 Sep 2011 by Evoluted New Media
Subatomic particles have travelled faster than light say puzzled scientists at CERN, who have posted results from their recent experiments online for the community to scrutinise.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from CERN towards the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km in Italy arrived a fraction of a second early say scientists working on the OPERA experiment. Their results suggest they travelled about 20 parts per million faster than the speed of light.
The physicists are remaining cautious about their results, which threaten to upend a century of modern physics, as laid out by Einstein’s special theory of relativity. Given the potential far-reaching consequences of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the effect can be refuted or firmly established – sp the OPERA team have opened their results to broader scrutiny.
“This result comes as a complete surprise,” said Antonio Ereditato, OPERA spokesperson. “After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effects that could explain the result of the measurements. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation.”
In order to perform this study, OPERA teamed up with metrology experts to perform a series of high precision measurements of the distance between the source and the detector, and the neutrinos’ time of flight. The time of flight of over 15,000 neutrinos was determined with an accuracy of less than 10 nanoseconds by using sophisticated instruments including advanced GPS systems and atomic clocks.
“We have established synchronisation between CERN and Gran Sasso that gives us nanosecond accuracy and we’ve measured the distance between the two sites to 20cm,” said Dario Autiero. “Although our measurements have low systematic uncertainty and high statistical accuracy, and we place great confidence in our results, we’re looking forward to comparing them with those from other experiments.”
Ereditato said: “The potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate conclusions to attempt physics interpretations. My first reaction is that the neutrino is still surprising us with its mysteries.”
The team’s results are available at http://arvix.org/abs/1109.4897
