OPERA Confirms: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light

XiXiDu

New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound.

Link: nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/faster-than-light-neutrinos-opera.html

The OPERA Collaboration sent to the Cornell Arxiv an updated version of their preprint today, where they summarize the results of their analysis, expanded with additional statistical tests, and including the check performed with 20 additional neutrino interactions they collected in the last few weeks. These few extra timing measurements crucially allow the ruling out of some potential unaccounted sources of systematic uncertainty, notably ones connected to the knowledge of the proton spill time distribution.

[...]

So what does OPERA find ? Their main result, based on the 15,233 neutrino interactions collected in three years of data taking, is unchanged from the September result. The most interesting part of the new publication is instead that the find that the 20 new neutrino events (where neutrino speeds are individually measured, as opposed to the combined measurement done with the three-year data published in September) confirm the earlier result: the arrival times appear to occur about 60 nanoseconds before they are expected.

Link: science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/opera_confirms_neutrinos_travel_faster_light-84763

Paper: kruel.co/paper-neutrino-velocity-JHEP.pdf

Previously on LW: lesswrong.com/lw/7rc/particles_break_lightspeed_limit/

New high-precision tests carried out by the OPERA collaboration in Italy broadly confirm its claim, made in September, to have detected neutrinos travelling at faster than the speed of light. The collaboration today submitted its results to a journal, but some members continue to insist that further checks are needed before the result can be considered sound.

Link: nextbigfuture.com/2011/11/faster-than-light-neutrinos-opera.html

The OPERA Collaboration sent to the Cornell Arxiv an updated version of their preprint today, where they summarize the results of their analysis, expanded with additional statistical tests, and including the check performed with 20 additional neutrino interactions they collected in the last few weeks. These few extra timing measurements crucially allow the ruling out of some potential unaccounted sources of systematic uncertainty, notably ones connected to the knowledge of the proton spill time distribution.

[...]

So what does OPERA find ? Their main result, based on the 15,233 neutrino interactions collected in three years of data taking, is unchanged from the September result. The most interesting part of the new publication is instead that the find that the 20 new neutrino events (where neutrino speeds are individually measured, as opposed to the combined measurement done with the three-year data published in September) confirm the earlier result: the arrival times appear to occur about 60 nanoseconds before they are expected.

Link: science20.com/quantum_diaries_survivor/opera_confirms_neutrinos_travel_faster_light-84763

Paper: kruel.co/paper-neutrino-velocity-JHEP.pdf

Previously on LW: lesswrong.com/lw/7rc/particles_break_lightspeed_limit/

1) if neutrinos can beat lightspeed, relativity could simply not apply to them, rather than applying in some weird twisted way.

2) Neutrinos are nearly perfectly exempt from photon interactions (the simplest diagram is to pop out a virtual W and electron).

3) This could be the reason for 1.

4) How, then, do other charged particles get all relativized? Well, photons get entangled with just about everything just by virtue of most things having electrical charge. That's what the renormalization theory is about - including all of the recursing interaction effects that a particle can't get rid of into its basic description.

So, if you have, say, innate Galileian relativity for most particles but not for light, which has a constant speed in a preferred rest frame, charged particles are going to act at least a little bit like relativity predicts - as the particle approaches light speed, the bow wave part of its E-field gets stronger and stronger, accumulating energy... as it approaches the speed of light the photon energy would diverge like on a jet about to go supersonic, except that unlike the jet, you simply can't get the photons out of the way fast enough.

Hmm. That really doesn't work, because it suggests that the mass dilation would vary proportional to charge, not to mass. So I withdraw the first notion too.

If Lorentzian relativity doesn't work, Galilean relativity is certainly not what replaces it. Moreover, I find it difficult to imagine how you could have photons transforming under Lorentz group and other particles transforming under Galilei (or whatever else) group. This will certainly produce inconsistencies, unless you managed to explain them away in some clever complicated way.

I would rather accept that neutrinos are indeed tachyons, whatever weird consequences it may have.

0kilobug15y

The problem is that neutrinos can carry information. And if you carry information faster than light, you either have "time travel", or you screw up the whole framework of relativity. So... it's an easy claim that "relativity could simply not apply to them".

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OPERA Confirms: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light

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OPERA Confirms: Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light

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