Pions don’t want to decay into faster-than-light neutrinos, study finds. When an international collaboration of physicists came up with a result that punched a hole in Einstein’s theory of special relativity and couldn’t find any mistakes in their work, they asked the world to take a second look at their experiment. Responding to the call was Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Cowsik Online and in the December 24 issue of Physical Review Letters, Cowsik and his collaborators put their finger on what appears to be an insurmountable problem with the experiment.
The OPERA experiment, a collaboration between the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy, timed particles called neutrinos traveling through Earth from the physics laboratory CERN to a detector in an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, a distance of some 730 kilometers, or about 450 miles. Study rejects faster than light particle finding. By Robert Evans GENEVA Mon Nov 21, 2011 3:37pm GMT GENEVA (Reuters) - An international team of scientists in Italy studying the same neutrino particles colleagues say appear to have travelled faster than light rejected the startling finding this weekend, saying their tests had shown it must be wrong.
The September announcement of the finding, backed up last week after new studies, caused a furore in the scientific world as it seemed to suggest Albert Einstein's ideas on relativity, and much of modern physics, were based on a mistaken premise. The first team, members of the OPERA experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory south of Rome, said they recorded neutrinos beamed to them from the CERN research centre in Switzerland as arriving 60 nanoseconds before light would have done. In a paper posted on Saturday on the same website as the OPERA results, arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763v2, the ICARUS team says their findings "refute a superluminal (faster than light) interpretation of the OPERA result. " Speed-of-light experiment 'was wrong after all' Scientists Set to Re-Run Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Experiments. Moving somewhat slower than the speed of light, the team of researchers who last month shocked the scientific world with a claim that they had observed neutrinos traveling faster than that well-established cosmic speed barrier are now in the process of repeating their experiment in the face of skepticism about their methods.
In September, an international team of scientists led by Dr. Sergio Bertolucci reported that particles they had been firing for several years from the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland at detectors at the OPERA facility in Gran Sasso, Italy placed about 450 miles away appeared to be arriving at their destination a fraction of a second earlier than the time it would take light to get there. The particles, traveling through air, water, and rock, shouldn't have hit the Gran Sasso detectors any sooner than about 2.4 thousandths of a second after being fired, which is the time it would take light to travel the distance between the two points. Physicists check whether neutrinos really can travel faster than light.
According to Einstein's theory of special relativity nothing – not even neutrinos – can travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. Photograph: Cine Text/Allstar The scientists who last month appeared to have found that certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light have fine-tuned their experiment to check whether the remarkable discovery is correct. Their modified experiments – which are the result of suggestions from other physicists about potential flaws in their research – should be completed before the end of the year. The original experiment, reported last month, involved firing beams of neutrinos through the ground from Cern near Geneva to the Gran Sasso lab in Italy 720 kilometres (450 miles) away. The neutrinos seemed to arrive sixty billionths of a second earlier than they would if they had been travelling at the speed of light in a vacuum. The new experiment has already started at Cern and, Strassler said, would be completed before the end of the year.
FTL neutrinos explained? Not so fast, folks. If you haven’t heard about the experiment that apparently showed that subatomic particles called neutrinos might move faster than light (what we in the know call FTL, to make us look cooler), then I assume this is your first time on the internet. If that’s the case, then you can read my writeup on what happened. Basically, neutrinos move very very fast, almost at the speed of light. Some scientists created neutrinos at CERN in Geneva, and then measured how long it took them to reach a detector called OPERA, located in Italy. When they did the math, it looked like the neutrinos actually got there by traveling a hair faster than the speed of light! 60 nanoseconds faster, to be accurate. Was relativity doomed? Nope. First, most scientists were skeptical. Most everyone zeroed in on the timing of the experiment, which has to be extremely accurate. The scientists used a very sophisticated GPS setup to determine the timing, so that has been the focus of a lot of scrutiny as well.
Case closed! OPERA review serves up a feast for physics geeks. High performance access to file storage Let’s get the “big news” out of the way first: there’s a lot of excitement due to one paper published on Arxiv.org, which asks whether the CERN OPERA experiment – the one that seemed to detect superluminal neutrinos – took into account the “satellite reference frame” in its calculations. So the short version of the paper is this: did the calculations conducted on the OPERA data treat the clocks on the GPS satellites as being stationary with respect to the detector (more precisely for The Register’s crowd-sourced scientific sub-editors, I mean “in the same reference frame as the detector”)?
If so, van Elburg argues, it would be a source of error, because the satellites aren’t stationary; and the error he predicts a worst-case correction of 64 nanoseconds. It also suits journalists’ sense of narrative: Einstein’s theory used to prove that Einstein was right. The most sensible discussion of this hypothesis I've seen is on the Bad Astronomy blog, here. Speedy neutrino mystery likely solved, relativity safe after all. Beyond the speed of light. With potentially groundbreaking data published in the last few weeks, Conor O’Nolan talks about the experiments that could change physics forever Two weeks ago scientists at OPERA in Italy, working in collaboration with CERN in Geneva, published a paper which suggested that they have observed neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.
News of their apparent discovery went viral instantly, and the findings were published on a number of news websites before the CERN website was even updated. Should these results be verified, a large proportion of physics will have to be completely rewritten. In the seventeenth century, Issac Newton invented Newtonian mechanics. This worked perfectly for a few hundred years, but as physics progressed it became apparent that this paradigm did not work when it came to the very fast and the very small. Wolfgang Pauli postulated the neutrino in 1930 to explain the observed discrepancies in beta decay (A type radioactive decay). Einstein's Theory May Put Brakes on Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos. Just days after Albert Einstein's theory that nothing moves faster than light was called into question by a startling neutrino experiment, the long-dead physicist might have come to his own rescue.
Einstein's general theory of relativity contends that a slight difference in the force of gravity at two different places causes clocks in those places to tick at different rates. Carlo Contaldi, a theoretical physicist at Imperial College London, argues that when physicists recently measured neutrinos traveling at 1.000025 times light-speed between Switzerland and Italy, they didn't fully correct for this effect, and that failing to do so could have caused their shocking results. "I think there are significant questions as to whether or not their clocks were synchronized correctly," Contaldi told Life's Little Mysteries, a sister site to LiveScience. His paper, posted online to the physics arXiv preprint site on Sept. 30, is one of the first to challenge the neutrino experiment's process. Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed.
Read more: "Neutrinos: Complete guide to the ghostly particle" A CERN experiment claims to have caught neutrinos breaking the universe's most fundamental speed limit. The ghostly subatomic particles seem to have zipped faster than light from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to a detector in Italy. Fish that physics textbook back out of the wastebasket, though: the new result contradicts previous measurements of neutrino speed that were based on a supernova explosion. What's more, there is still room for error in the departure time of the supposed speedsters. And even if the result is correct, thanks to theories that posit extra dimensions, it does not necessarily mean that the speed of light has been beaten. "If it's true, it's fantastic.
Neutrinos are nearly massless subatomic particles that are notoriously shy of interacting with other forms of matter. Supernova contradiction Fuzzy departure Sher also mentions a third option: that the measurement is correct. Neutrinos: Everything you need to know. Read more: "Neutrinos: Complete guide to the ghostly particle" "…We don't allow faster-than-light neutrinos in here," says the barman. A neutrino walks into a bar…" As reports spread of subatomic particles moving faster than light and potentially travelling through time, such gags were born. But apparently super-hasty motion is not the only strange thing about neutrinos. What exactly are they? With a neutral charge and nearly zero mass, neutrinos are the shadiest of particles, rarely interacting with ordinary matter and slipping through our bodies, buildings and the Earth at a rate of trillions per second.
First predicted in 1930 by Wolfgang Pauli, who won a Nobel prize for this work in 1945, they are produced in various nuclear reactions: fusion, which powers the sun; fission, harnessed by humans to make weapons and energy; and during natural radioactive decay inside the Earth. If they are so stealthy, how do we know they are there at all?
Where are these experiments found? Anything else? Q&A: Discovery with potential to break major dogma. Why has Cern’s discovery of subatomic particles travelling faster than light caused such a scientific sensation? If verified, it would overturn a scientific dogma that has stood since Albert Einstein published his theory of relativity early in the 20th century: that nothing can move faster than light – 299,792,458 metres per second. A huge superstructure of theoretical physics rests on the assumption that the speed of light (c in the famous equation of mass energy equivalence, E=mc2) is a fundamental constant. Some scientific discoveries turn up when expected; the discovery of the much-publicised Higgs particle at Cern’s atom smasher, the Large Hadron Collider, would come into this category.
Others, like neutrinos apparently breaking nature’s ultimate speed limit, come out of the blue – and invite the response: “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” How good is the evidence so far? Can such an important discovery be based on such a tiny difference in arrival times? Large Hadron Collider scientists think they may have disproved a law of physics by breaking the speed of light. ASTONISHED scientists are in complete shock after they apparently blew apart one of the basic laws of physics. Researchers say they have recorded particles travelling faster than the speed of light – something that was understood to be impossible. Subatomic particles were beamed from the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva towards a lab 450 miles away in Italy and they arrived a fraction of a second quicker than they should have.
Lead researcher Dr Antonio Ereditato has labelled the results as “crazy” because Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity – which has been the basis of physics for a century – depends on the idea that nothing can exceed the speed of light in a vacuum. The LHC team has now published its findings after repeating the experiment thousands of times. Dr Ereditato said: “We tried to find all possible explanations for this.
We wanted to find a mistake – trivial mistakes, more complicated mistakes, or nasty effects. Scientists claim to break speed of light. An international team of scientists say they have recorded neutrino particles traveling at faster than the speed of light. A spokesman for the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) particle physics centre announced the news on Thursday, a finding that could disprove aspects of Albert Einstein's theory that nothing can go faster than the speed of light (299,792,458 m/s, or 1,080 million km/hr). The measurements still must be confirmed, but if verified, would represent a serious challenge to one of the fundamental rules of physics.
"We have high confidence in our results. But we need other colleagues to do their tests and confirm them," said Antonio Ereditato, who works at the CERN centre on the Franco-Swiss border. Ereditato told the Reuters news agency that measurements over three years had shown neutrinos moving at 60 nanoseconds quicker than the speed of light over a distance of 730km between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy. A nanosecond is one-billionth of a second.