Post 31: Those neutrinos deserve a speeding ticket.

For those of you who don’t know, or may not have cared to know, the speed of light is known as a constant in physics, and also as the universal speed limit. This speed limit was put in place thanks to Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of relativity. Nothing travels faster than the speed of light, or so we thought.

Two months ago the physics community was baffled by an experiment preformed by the Opera Collaboration at Gran Sasso, one of a number of facilities that make up CERN in Geneva, Switzerland. After launching long beam pulses of high-intensity, high-energy muon neutrinos, the researchers detected startling results. The resulting proton neutrinos were traveling at a speed faster than the speed of light.

            Thanks to research done by the one and only Einstein, the scientific community is reluctant to accept that the speed of light is not a constant, let alone be surpassed by a neutrino. A neutrino is an electrically neutral elementary subatomic particle with a small mass that usually travels at speeds close to that of light.

            The Opera Collaboration was forced to re-conduct their experiment show that the results were nit the result of a statistical fluke. A couple of instrumental changes were made to the experiment including the use of short beam pulses, and increased the separation interval. Upon re-conducting the experiment earlier this month, the team gained the same results.

            A researcher in the physics department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Michael Witherell commends the researchers of Opera for addressing the beam length concern that many scientists had after the first experiment. Unfortunately, Witherell is still uncertain about accepting the results. “At this point, the only thing that will really change our understanding is to have one or more experiments agree or disagree with Opera’s measurements.”

            This is by no means the end of the story. A number of other possible errors need to be accounted for. This most recent run of the experiment only riles out one potential source of a systematic error. The results of the experiment must also be reproducible.

            Two more teams from Gran Sasso are working on experiments, Borexino and Icarus, to crosscheck Opera’s results, independently. Specifically, Borexino is focusing on solar neutrino physics and Icarus is looking at the usage of liquid argon detectors to study neutrinos. The issue with these two experiments is that they lack the equipment to conduct timing measurements accurately enough.

            There are two other groups not located at the Gran Sasso lab that will seek to duplicate the results. Japan has their T2K experiment and the Unites States has the Minos experiment. Minos is the best candidate to move forward with the research because the measurements are said to be a factor of five or so better than what Opera’s doing now.

            Decades of knowledge may be unraveling before our eyes. Many physicists are hesitant to accept the result, and allow their universe to be overturned.