There is no 'T=0', and no single firing of neutrinos. Edit: The "problem" is solved: it was mainly a problem in the timing chain, due to a badly screwed optical fibre. In the last many days I have seen much written about the possibilities that faster than light (FTL) neutrinos would open up. 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. Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic Society, Copyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. Faster than light? Neutrino finding puzzles scientists If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics. Like most scientists, my guess is an unaccounted for systematic error (because they definitely have statistical significance and precision on their side) that has yet to be pointed out, but it probably won't take too long with all the theoretical physicists that will be pouring through this experiment. Neutrinos in the MINOS experiment cover 735 kilometers, about the same distance as CERNs experiment. The neutrinos are little affected by matter and seem to be covering more "meters" than vacuum meters. 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." Neutrinos and antineutrinos can oscillate, or change flavor, from one type into another when they pass through matter. They can change flavor from one type (electron, mu, tau) into another. 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Before the neutrino was known or detected, it appeared that both energy and momentum were not conserved in beta decays. Neutrinos are, however, the most common particle Furthermore, the pulses are quite long (10s), so an error in this analysis could easily be of the good order of magnitude. Scientists around the world reacted with cautious shock on Friday to results from an Italian laboratory that seemed to show that certain subatomic particles can travel faster than light. With all of this information combined, weve learned an incredible amount of information about these ghostly neutrinos. Those neutrinos might be all around us, as an inevitable part of the galaxy, but we cannot directly detect them. This article explains it in a very accessible way: To understand how relativity altered the neutrino experiment, it helps to pretend that we're hanging out on one of those GPS satellites, watching the Earth go by underneath you. For the majority of neutrinos produced in the modern Universe, through stars, supernovae, and other natural nuclear reactions, it would take about a light-year worth of lead to stop approximately half of the neutrinos fired upon it. Particles Moved Faster Than Speed of Light? - National Geographic In summary: nothing is wrong with the calculation, the theoretical assumptions, rotation of the Earth, etc A hardware problem caused the 60 ns time gap. So it would. No, the detectors are not identical, but the offset they're measuring is not just what they read off their clocks. To put the remarkably small size of a neutrino into perspective, consider that neutrinos are thought to be a million times smaller than electrons, which have a mass of 9.11 10 -31 kilograms 2. But if you could transform a neutrino into an antineutrino simply by changing your frame-of-reference, that would mean that neutrinos are a special, new type of particle that exists only in theory thus far: a Majorana fermion. I suppose an explanation along these lines would mean interesting new particle physics. Virtually every physicist interviewed strongly doubts the results will hold up, including the experimenters themselves. This is not supported by the supernova data. A careless reading of the paper might make you think that it is contrary to Einstein, but it is not. What would be the effects on theoretical physics if neutrinos go faster than light? Neutrinos don't outpace light, but they do shape-shift Given how big this question is, maybe it would be best to delete this answer? According their calculations, theres only a one in a billion chance that what theyre seeing is a statistical fluke. [+] It was the closest observed supernova to Earth in more than three centuries, and the neutrinos that arrived from it came in a burst lasting about ~10 seconds: equivalent to the time that neutrinos are expected to be produced. 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The Special Theory of Relativity (STR) of Einstein, through the principle of the speed limit, makes the magnetic force come from the electric one and the magnetic force is an electric force, as physicists know; an easy demonstration of that can be found in chapter 3 of my file at the following link (also English inside): http://www.fisicamente.net/FISICA_2/UNIFICAZIONE_GRAVITA_ELETTROMAGNETISMO.pdf. Which we know. Neutrinos are weird, but they arent that weird. Leading Light: What Would Faster-Than-Light Neutrinos Mean for EDIT it seems this effect is settled to be a missing correction due to sattelite-speed terms: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2685. Or am I labouring under a false premise? Faster Than Light That's the correct design if you want to measure the speed of the neutrinos reliably. "Most theorists believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. Today, our mission remains the same: to empower people to evaluate the news and the world around them. I asked another question that might come up with something. 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. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. The CMB referential clearly is the only referential to observe the light as isotropic. All rights reserved. But since they have mass, there is no reason that they couldnt travel at any speed. Thanks for making a community wiki reply. The original paper publishing these findings is here: Times of Flight between a Source and a Detector observed from a GPS satelite. Where do the most energetic neutrinos come from? Its one of the biggest open questions about neutrinos, and the capability to detect low-energy neutrinos the ones moving slow compared to the speed of light would answer that question. But archaeology is confirming that Persia's engineering triumph was real. Never rejected as being a fake effect. At Japans T2K experiment, where particles travel only 295 kilometers, the speed discrepancy would be smaller and more difficult to observe. By clicking Accept all cookies, you agree Stack Exchange can store cookies on your device and disclose information in accordance with our Cookie Policy. [2], This experiment doesn't use that sort of 'stopwatch' timing mechanism though. That never repeated. Weve measured neutrinos produced by the Sun. This stone has a mysterious past beyond British coronations, Ultimate Italy: 14 ways to see the country in a new light, 6 unforgettable Italy hotels, from Lake Como to Rome, A taste of Rioja, from crispy croquettas to piquillo peppers, Trek through this stunning European wilderness, Land of the lemurs: the race to save Madagascar's sacred forests, Photograph courtesy Maximilien Brice, CERN. Weve measured neutrinos and antineutrinos produced in nuclear reactors. Meanwhile, the detector in Italy is moving just as fast as the rest of the Earth, and from our perspective it's moving towards the source. Neutrino oscillation might, for example, then make early neutrino more detectable by the distant detector. 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 . They account for the time it takes to process the signal and work backwards from their measurements to determine the time at which the neutrino actually interacted with the detector. All of our observations, combined, have enabled us to draw some conclusions about the rest mass of neutrinos and antineutrinos. As the neutrino experiment goes by, we start timing one of the neutrinos as it exits the source in Switzerland. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. But light travels at a constant speed. Whether right-handed neutrinos (and left-handed antineutrinos) are real or not is an unanswered question that could unlock many mysteries about the cosmos. By identifying identical patterns at input and output streams, they can identify how long it took particles to travel between the points. Are these Articles truthful and Neutrinos do travel faster than light? But the time and distance measurements have been verified by multiple methods, and the methods are ones that are standard and reliable. That confirmation may be much longer in coming, as only a few facilities worldwide have the detectors needed to catch the notoriously flighty neutrinos - which interact with matter so rarely as to have earned the nickname "ghost particles". You may opt-out by. Never confirmed. So much so that they even detect slow earth crust migration and millimetres of changes in distance between source and destination when something like an earthquake occurs. Consequences for causality if superluminal neutrinos were explained by extra dimensions, Distance and time measurement in the famous Superluminal Neutrinos Experiment. And through two independent sets of measurements from the large-scale structure of the Universe and the remnant light left over from the Big Bang we can conclude that approximately one billion neutrinos and antineutrinos were produced in the Big Bang for every proton in the Universe today. Is there a generic term for these trajectories? IMO what really needs to happen now is two things: (1) Other groups will try to reproduce the anomaly. If so, the observation would IMO this is only possible if they are synchronised as in the above paper (instant observer) and not in the Einstein way that only considers one path between the observer and any other point (Synchronisation around the circumference of a rotating disk gives a non vanishing time difference that depends on the direction used). [8] In February and March 2012, OPERA researchers blamed this result on a loose fibre optic cable connecting a GPS receiver to an If you catch a neutrino or antineutrino moving in a particular direction, you'll find that its [+] intrinsic angular momentum exhibits either clockwise or counterclockwise spin, corresponding to whether the particle in question is a neutrino or antineutrino. ), 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? However, I will post this "consideration" anyway @MSalters: I agree. All particles show the same speed limit as light, yet neutrinos with a rest mass greater than light possess a larger speed limit? Who buys lion bones? Can't the "timing offset" of detection depend on some build parameters that are different, or is the measured excess velocity simply too large for being caused by something like that? @Lagerbaer I think the trajectory is all underground it starts in a deep tunnel at CERN and ends under a mountain at Gran Sasso :-). OPERAs neutrinos were born from protons smashed into a chunk of graphite at CERN. Beta decay is a decay that [+] proceeds through the weak interactions, converting a neutron into a proton, electron, and an anti-electron neutrino. After painstakingly checking and rechecking their data, physicists working on Italys OPERA experiment say they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. In a recent paper, the physicists argue that if neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, they would rapidly lose energy, depleting the beam of more energetic particles. Massachusetts Institute of Technology The MAJORANA experiment, shown here, has the potential to finally detect this rare decay. By filling spacetime with a field that has a preferred direction, the physicists create a universe that still has an ultimate speed limit just not one thats necessarily set by light. These are simple measurements that could be checked in an afternoon by a competent 2nd-year grad student. Neutrino is not faster than light. What are the advantages of running a power tool on 240 V vs 120 V? There have been plenty of papers (well, preprints) have been put forward offering various explanations of the OPERA results, but none of them has been widely accepted yet as far as I know so it's rather premature to say the results have been explained. It is published by the Society for Science, a nonprofit 501(c)(3) membership organization dedicated to public engagement in scientific research and education (EIN 53-0196483). Even so, this very experiment was a repeat of a MINOS experiment, which found the same effect at much lower levels of confidence, and this time it involved 15.000+ neutrino detections (which, however, could not be individually labelled faster or slower than light). Weve measured neutrinos produced by the closest supernova to occur in the past century: SN 1987A. After all, you can move an electron faster than a photon in glass, and we don't call it the end of relativity, we call it Cherenkov radiation. 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. Subscribers, enter your e-mail address for full access to the Science News archives and digital editions. But at this point nobody sober would be willing to say that this is right., Questions or comments on this article? The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Now, November 21, 2011, with 3ns pulses, the new value for the "missing time" is 62.1ns +/-3.7 (only 20 events).