Neutrino Parents Call Into Question Faster-than-light Results. Critics Take Aim At Fast Neutrinos. A new study puts the brakes on faster-than-light neutrinos.
In September, a group at Italy’s OPERA experiment reportedly clocked neutrinos traveling the 730 kilometers from CERN in Switzerland to Italy’s underground Gran Sasso National Laboratory about 60 nanoseconds faster than light would have covered that distance in a vacuum (SN: 10/22/11, p. 18). But if this were true, most of the neutrinos would have shed energy en route, a new analysis by Boston University physicists suggests.
OPERA should have detected this radiation, say the physicists, if its claims are to be believed. It didn’t. “I would be ecstatic to see some kind of new physics coming from this experiment,” says Andrew Cohen, a theoretical physicist who, with Nobel Prize–winner Sheldon Glashow, reports the new finding in an upcoming Physical Review Letters. A similar type of energy loss has long been studied in water and other materials in which light travels slower than it does in empty space. He’s not the only one. BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results. Skip to main content Science/AAAS Subscribe Main menu You are here News » ScienceInsider » Physics » BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results Edwin Cartlidge Share on facebookShare on twitterShare on redditMore Sharing ServicesShare on email ScienceInsider BREAKING NEWS: Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results 22 February 2012 1:45 pm 232 Comments It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all.
Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso laboratory near L'Aquila that appeared to make the trip in about 60 nanoseconds less than light speed. According to sources familiar with the experiment, the 60 nanoseconds discrepancy appears to come from a bad connection between a fiber optic cable that connects to the GPS receiver used to correct the timing of the neutrinos' flight and an electronic card in a computer.
Physics. Faster-than-light neutrinos dealt another blow - physics-math - 04 January 2012. Read more: "Neutrinos: Complete guide to the ghostly particle" Faster-than-light neutrinos can't catch a break.
If they exist they would not only flout special relativity but also the fundamental tenet that energy is conserved in the universe. This suggests that either the speedy neutrino claim is wrong or that new physics is needed to account for it. In September, physicists with the OPERA experiment in Gran Sasso, Italy, reported that neutrinos had apparently travelled there from CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, faster than light.
The claim threatened to blow a hole in modern physics – chiefly Einstein's special theory of relativity, which set the speed of light as the absolute limit for all particles in the universe. Now a team including Shmuel Nussinov of Tel Aviv University in Israel says it could also put a dent in the principle of the conservation of energy. Unequal inheritance The neutrinos apparently outpaced light by 60 nanoseconds. 'Absolute contradiction' But we do. Recommended by. Official Word on Superluminal Neutrinos Leaves Warp-Drive Fans a Shred of Hope—Barely.