And a cable can go bad if somebody hits it the wrong way with their butt while they are working in the electronics room. Is climate change killing Australian wine? Physics Faster-than-light neutrino result to get extra checks News. rev2023.5.1.43405. Does eating close to bedtime make you gain weight? A claim that neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light would be revolutionary if true, but "I would bet against it," physicist says. Interpreting non-statistically significant results: Do we have "no evidence" or "insufficient evidence" to reject the null? What one would need to explain is why hadrons and non-neutrino leptons experience exactly the same "braking" effekt as photons do. Even though few believe that these results will ultimately hold up, their implications have stirred up quite a fuss. The distance seems to be known within 20cm and the synchronisation seems to be within 15ns (6.9 statistical and 7.4 systematic). The initial series of experiments, comprising 15,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have, travelling unimpeded over the same distance. Even so, let's focus on what's more likely: There are no neutrino fairies, and the conflict between data and special relativity lies with >> 6-sigma likelyhood of it being an error with the experiment. the electronics involved in the time measurement has some clock domain running at 16MHz. @celtschk right, but I'm accounting for the small probability that the known laws of physics are wrong. matter, it will have a certain probability of oscillating, something that can only happen if neutrinos have very small but non-zero masses. If neutrinos obey this see-saw mechanism and are Majorana particles, neutrinoless double beta decay should be possible. And thats unfortunate, because detecting these low-energy neutrinos the ones that move slow compared to the speed of light would enable us to perform an important test that weve never performed before. @MSalters: I agree. proceeds through the weak interactions, converting a neutron into a proton, electron, and an anti-electron neutrino. Even after that derivation a sensitive experiment should be perceived to break it through further. @Ron, any (general) relativistic effect cannot make the speed superluminal, but it can make your length measurement based on GPS incorrect. It has been posted to the Arxiv repository and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community. The lowest-energy neutrinos weve ever detected have so much energy that their speed must be, at minimum, 99.99999999995% the speed of light, which means that they can move no slower than 299,792,457.99985 meters-per-second. Youd never, no matter how much energy you put into yourself, be able to overtake it. And yet, its angular momentum would have to be the same, in the counterclockwise direction, meaning youd have to use your right hand to represent it, rather than your left. [2], This experiment doesn't use that sort of 'stopwatch' timing mechanism though. Anyway Einstein is correct, and the neutrinos are not superluminal. Quantum Tunnels Show How Particles Can Break the Speed of Light. The result may be announced as soon as November or December. This means that the shift can only be detected statistically, and it makes the result extremely vulnerable to unanticipated systematic errors, e.g., correlations between the time of emission of the neutrinos and their energy (which strongly affects the efficiency of detection) or the direction of emission. I found that odd given that they do have a downstream muon detector system, but they may be concerned about backgrounds. Invest in quality science journalism by donating today. Before the neutrino was known or detected, it appeared that both energy and momentum were not conserved in beta decays. According to Dr. Phil Plait, there's a rumour that it's been a faulty connection. Over 3 years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. Either energy and momentum were being lost, and these supposedly fundamental conservation laws were no good, or there was a hitherto undetected additional particle being created that carried that excess energy and momentum away. Imagine that youve got a neutrino, and youre traveling behind it. particles from one another. Neutrinos You must convince yourself that the absolute measurements have the same error bars as the relative measurements, and I did not see that in the arxiv paper. It's still gossip, so take this with abundance of caution, but here's what he had to say: 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. Several of my colleague suspect there may be a subtle effect hiding here, but it is not as if they didn't think of it. An experiment that creates particles called neutrinos has called into question Einsteins theory of special relativity. When a nucleus experiences a double neutron decay, two electrons and two neutrinos get emitted [+] conventionally. Ask him to bet against the new results, though, and he says hed be willing to bet his house. An Italian experiment has unveiled evidence that fundamental particles known as neutrinos can travel faster than light. When the Opera team ran the improved experiment 20 times, they found almost exactly the same result. Edit: The "problem" is solved: it was mainly a problem in the timing chain, due to a badly screwed optical fibre. If the results from OPERA are accurate, this effect would be a full-blown real Lorentz violation, not just an apparent effect like Cerenkov radiation or astronomical superluminal motion. Relativity is really well-tested, and it's really hard to conceive of a way that neutrinos could travel faster than light without it having other consequences that we would have discovered by now. U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. [10 (If the result is wrong, then it should be independent of the energy.). It looks like they took an insane amount of care with their measurement of distance and time. Thats what Patreon supporter Laird Whitehill wants to know, asking: I know neutrinos travel almost at the speed of light. The problem with the GPS position measurements (I think that the time measurements are accurate) is that the relative position is not subject to the same systematics as the aboslute position. Nevertheless, theres a tantalizing chance we have to resolve this paradox, despite the difficulty inherent to it. "That doesn't make sense," they say. A superluminal neutrino beam would have lost a lot of its energy via radiation, but a measurement by another detector shows that this was not the case: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.3763 Superluminal motion for neutrinos would also cause superluminal motion for electrons, which is contrary to observation http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.5682 , and it would also have caused a suppression of pion decay, so that the beam could never have been produced in the first place http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.6630 . I believe this question needs a couple of years more investigation. gives the max value of $\frac{\left|c_{V\pm\delta V}-c_{V}\right|}{c_{V}}\cdot10^{5}$=10.2. Standard Big Bang cosmology corresponds to =1. But this is a positive result.". Indeed, they didn't report "we found superluminal neutrinos" but "we measured data that looks like superluminal neutrinos, but after searching for quite some time still cannot find an error in the experiment, so we now decided to publish so that others can check if we have possibly a real effect; we keep searching for an error anyways." Their cross-section is literally millions of times too small to have a chance at seeing them, as these tiny energies wouldnt produce recoils noticeable by our current equipment. Heres where the disconnect between theory and experiment lies. Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site. First off, they cannot be zero. ', referring to the nuclear power plant in Ignalina, mean? (Related: "Proton Smaller Than ThoughtMay Rewrite Laws of Physics."). I asked another question that might come up with something. A high level description of the problem is given here and a more detailed explanation of the investigation is here. Given the sheer diversity of possible `goof-up' explanations on this page (all answers combined), I can't help feeling that we are trying to find one plausible way in which this can be MADE to look wrong. I'm quite impressed that they had ~100ns timing resolution between the two laboratories; the "discovery" came about because they were trying to do ten times better than that. Light traveling in a vacuum would have made this trip in 2.43 milliseconds. Last year, OPERA measured that neutrinos were making the 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip between the two labs more speedily than light, arriving there It is less important that the rotation of the Earth. [1]. [The result was announced Nov. 17, and I lost my six-pack.]. The official announcement of the result, on September 23 at the European physics laboratory CERN near Geneva, was met with cheering but also with a barrage of questions from those scrutinizing the experiment for unknown sources of error that may be misleading the physicists. To approach a question 400 million years in the making, researchers turned to mudskippers, blinking fish that live partially out of water. Neutrino is not faster than light. Given how big this question is, maybe it would be best to delete this answer? "If things travel faster than the speed of light, A can cause B, [but] B can also cause A," Parke said. New results, @Sklivvz: a massive particle moving faster than massless photons is what also happens in Cherenkov radiation. Is there a generic term for these trajectories? Never rejected as being a fake effect. "This is reassuring that it's not the end of the story.". That never repeated. And yet neutrinos and antineutrinos, despite appearing to move at the speed of light, must have a non-zero rest mass, otherwise this neutrino oscillation phenomenon would not be possible. ), This is inspirational (for theorists and experimentalists alike) :D. MINOS is reporting a completely independent (different beam as well as different detectors) measurement as of July 2015: Are the observers using exactly identical detectors? In theory, because neutrinos have a non-zero rest mass, it should be possible for them to slow down to non-relativistic speeds. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. The community was properly incredulous and the wide interest prompted a large number of other checks they could make. So it would. Why does Acts not mention the deaths of Peter and Paul? All of our observations, combined, have enabled us to draw some conclusions about the rest mass of neutrinos and antineutrinos. I thought it might be a good idea to list the possible systematic biases which could lead xkcd's character to win his bet. Do neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light? But, it's still possible! Are these Articles truthful and Neutrinos do travel faster than light? With due respect to everyone, this reminds of the old EPR remark by Einstein himself - ``everybody says it is wrong for some reason or the other, but curiously, no two people agree on what exactly is wrong with it''. The paper is on arXiv; a webcast is/was planned here. It makes sense that a neutrino is not subject to the same interactions, given its famed reluctance to interact with anything.
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