Particles break light-speed limit?

Kevin

13 Particles break light-speed limit?

by Kevin

23rd Sep 2011

1 min read

175

13

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1

http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=2169

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

At least one other experiment has seen a similar effect before, albeit with a much lower confidence level. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Thomas says that MINOS was already planning more accurate follow-up experiments before the latest OPERA result. "I'm hoping that we could get that going and make a measurement in a year or two," she says.

Perhaps the end of the era of the light cone and beginning of the era of the neutrino cone? I'd be curious to see your probability estimates for whether this theory pans out. Or other crackpot hypotheses to explain the results.

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13 Particles break light-speed limit?

by Kevin

23rd Sep 2011

1 min read

175

13

http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110922/full/news.2011.554.html

http://arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897v1

http://usersguidetotheuniverse.com/?p=2169

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3027056

Ereditato says that he is confident enough in the new result to make it public. The researchers claim to have measured the 730-kilometre trip between CERN and its detector to within 20 centimetres. They can measure the time of the trip to within 10 nanoseconds, and they have seen the effect in more than 16,000 events measured over the past two years. Given all this, they believe the result has a significance of six-sigma — the physicists' way of saying it is certainly correct. The group will present their results tomorrow at CERN, and a preprint of their results will be posted on the physics website ArXiv.org.

At least one other experiment has seen a similar effect before, albeit with a much lower confidence level. In 2007, the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment in Minnesota saw neutrinos from the particle-physics facility Fermilab in Illinois arriving slightly ahead of schedule. At the time, the MINOS team downplayed the result, in part because there was too much uncertainty in the detector's exact position to be sure of its significance, says Jenny Thomas, a spokeswoman for the experiment. Thomas says that MINOS was already planning more accurate follow-up experiments before the latest OPERA result. "I'm hoping that we could get that going and make a measurement in a year or two," she says.

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12OPERA Confirms: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light

3Particles may not have broken light speed limit

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Jack15y40

More relevant papers:

"Neutrinos Must Be Tachyons" (1997)

Abstract: The negative mass squared problem of the recent neutrino experiments from the five major institutions prompts us to speculate that, after all, neutrinos may be tachyons. There are number of reasons to believe that this could be the case. Stationary neutrinos have not been detected. There is no evidence of right handed neutrinos which are most likely to be observed if neutrinos can be stationary. They have the unusual property of the mass oscillation between flavors which has not been observed in the electron families. While Standard Model predicts the mass of neutrinos to be zero, the observed spectrum of Tritium decay experiments hasn't conclusively proved that the mass of neutrino is exactly zero. Based upon these observations and other related phenomena, we wish to argue that there are too many inconsistencies to fit neutrinos into the category of ordinary inside light cone particles and that the simplest possible way to resolve the mystery of the neutrino is to change our point of view and determine that neutrinos are actually tachyons.

This guy seems like someone a competent science journalist would be interviewing. I can't say I understand much of it, unfortunately.

see15y70

Tachyonic neutrinos can explain SN 1987A neutrinos beating photons to Earth, and tachyonic neutrinos can explain the CERN observations, but, critically, they cannot explain both phenomena simultaneously. The SN 1987A neutrinos apparently moved slower than the CERN neutrinos, when the pure tachyonic explanation would have them move faster than the CERN neutrinos.

This isn't to say neutrinos couldn't be tachyons, but it would still leave the CERN data requiring an explanation.

5Oscar_Cunningham15y

I hadn't realised is that neutrinos have never been observed going slower than light. If they had been observed going slower than light, then finding them also going faster would be absurd, since it would require infinite energy. But if they are always tachyons then them travelling faster than c is much less problematic. However I don't see how this explains the neutrinos from the supernova. In the paper it says that higher energies correspond to lower speeds (due to imaginary mass). The ones at CERN are 17GeV, whereas the ones from the supernova were 6.7MeV. But the difference in time for the supernova was proportionately smaller than that for the CERN neutrinos.

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