Particles break light-speed limit?

Kevin

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.

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.

When I looked at the paper, my impression is that it was a persistent result in the experiment, which would explain publication: the experiment's results will be public and someone, eventually, will notice this in the data. Better that CERN officially notice this in the data than Random High Energy Physicist. People relying on CERN's move to publish may want to update to account for this fact.

Forgive me for being a bit slow, but I honestly don't understand what you mean. I don't know why their publishing the results needs explanation; they already said it was because they couldn't find an error and are hoping that someone else will find one if it's there. Is your point that the fact that CERN published this rather than someone else is to be taken as evidence of its veracity? Or do you mean something else?

3Jack15y

This is a really good point.

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Particles break light-speed limit?

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Particles break light-speed limit?

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