With due respect to everyone, this reminds of the old EPR remark by Einstein himself - ``everybody says it is wrong for some reason or the other, but curiously, no two people agree on what exactly is wrong with it''. Can I use an 11 watt LED bulb in a lamp rated for 8.6 watts maximum? It was also extensively documented at every This is a fascinating paradox. The official announcement of the result, on September 23 at the European physics laboratory CERN near Geneva, was met with cheering but also with a barrage of questions from those scrutinizing the experiment for unknown sources of error that may be misleading the physicists. conventionally. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Ask Ethan: Do Neutrinos Always Travel At Nearly The Speed Of Light? Before the neutrino was known or detected, it appeared that both energy and momentum were not conserved in beta decays. When they finally did release their result, they had the courage to report it at face value. On board the worlds last surviving turntable ferry. This means that the shift can only be detected statistically, and it makes the result extremely vulnerable to unanticipated systematic errors, e.g., correlations between the time of emission of the neutrinos and their energy (which strongly affects the efficiency of detection) or the direction of emission. It was an unusual configuration and needed unusual termination hardware and I must have answered the question "but couldn't you just" a hundred times.). 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). Interpreting non-statistically significant results: Do we have "no evidence" or "insufficient evidence" to reject the null? Is the wave-particle duality a real duality? When a nucleus experiences a double neutron decay, two electrons and two neutrinos get emitted [+] conventionally. In theory, however, neutrinos can absolutely travel at any speed at all, so long as its slower than the cosmic speed limit: the speed of light in a vacuum. ", Members of the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, or OPERA, at the European Center for Nuclear, Copyright 1996-2015 National Geographic SocietyCopyright 2015-2023 National Geographic Partners, LLC. Next year, teams working on two other experiments at Gran Sasso experiments - Borexino and Icarus - will begin independent cross-checks of Opera's results. In an edited press release (and probably in the peer-reviewed literature as well), all four of the neutrino experiments at Gran Sasso report results consistent with relativity. An experiment that creates particles called neutrinos has called into question Einsteins theory of special relativity. The paper is on arXiv; a webcast is/was planned here. Inside South Africas skeleton trade. They found that, on average, the Note that if there is a dark matter/neutrino interaction present, the acoustic scale could be altered. The existence of faster-than-light particles would also wreak havoc on scientific theories of cause and effect. By Lisa Grossman. But they would also need to explain why previous experiments with particles of light have already ruled out effects that could explain the new neutrino results. In other words, the GPS clock is bang on the nose, but since the clock is in a different reference frame, you have to compensate for relativity if you're going to use it to make highly accurate measurements. WebThe neutrinos had apparently exceeded the speed of light . When to average in the lab for indirect measurements? Never confirmed. First off, they cannot be zero. @MSalters: I agree. If you go to measure the neutrinos angular momentum, it will behave as though its spinning counterclockwise: the same as if you pointed your left hands thumb forward and watched your fingers curl around it. Their cross-section is literally millions of times too small to have a chance at seeing them, as these tiny energies wouldnt produce recoils noticeable by our current equipment. In the last many days I have seen much written about the possibilities that faster than light (FTL) neutrinos would open up. Neutrino detectors, like the one used in the BOREXINO collaboration here, generally have an enormous [+] tank that serves as the target for the experiment, where a neutrino interaction will produce fast-moving charged particles that can then be detected by the surrounding photomultiplier tubes at the ends. The actual timing and positioning hasn't changed, so point one still stands. "Most theorists believe that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. WebA neutrino is an exponentially small particle with no electrical charge. As an experimentalist I don't begrudge the OPERA guys their error at all. Other proposals could accommodate faster-than-light travel with violating this principle of relativity, says Lee Smolin, a theoretical physicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada. Weve measured neutrinos produced by the Sun. And yet neutrinos and antineutrinos, despite appearing to move at the speed of light, must have a non-zero rest mass, otherwise this neutrino oscillation phenomenon would not be possible. It has been posted to the Arxiv repository and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, but has not yet been reviewed by the scientific community. IMO what really needs to happen now is two things: (1) Other groups will try to reproduce the anomaly. This image shows multiple events, and is part of the suite of experiments paving our way to a greater understanding of neutrinos. 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 the time and distance measurements have been verified by multiple methods, and the methods are ones that are standard and reliable. Speedy neutrino result may be due to instrument glitch, http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2012/02/speedy-neutrino-result-may-be.html, Loose Cable Explains Faulty 'Faster-than-light' Neutrino Result, http://www.space.com/14654-error-faster-light-neutrinos.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+spaceheadlines+%28SPACE.com+Headline+Feed%29. In 2004 Mewes and Alan Kostelecky of Indiana University in Bloomington published a paper in Physical Review D describing one such theory. This will be a tremendous revolutionary finding if it is true, says Chang Kee Jung, a particle physicist at Stony Brook University in New York and a spokesperson for the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan. If I were conspiratorially minded, I would say they are covering up an uncorrected relativistic effect with a bogus story of a hardware error. The neutrinos are emitted on a 10.5s window, 175 times longer than the observed effect. There's no complicated theoretical analysis that needs to be done to determine whether the speed of light was exceeded. Who buys lion bones? Instead of seeing it move away from you, youd see it move towards you. The only explanation is systematic errors in GPS position, GPS time, or bunching statistics. a neutrino) would we be able to measure a higher speed. Neutrinos are weird, but they arent that weird. Neutrinos are tiny subatomic particles, often called 'ghost particles' because they barely interact with anything else. All Things Neutrino was developed byFermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Americas premier laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. 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. This doesn't seem right--- could a hardware problem actually do this? I'm sure they spent an entire year shitting pineapples because they couldn't identify the problem. I have a bet running with a colleage, for a six-pack of Fat Tire, that the new run will show that the original result was bogus. This paper (Cosmological Principle and Relativity - Part I) analyses the anisotropy of light speed for a moving observer. I've seen suggestions such as the gravity of the Earth being different along the path of the neutrinos, which warps space/time unevenly. A new discovery raises a mystery. The issue we have is twofold: The only neutrino interactions we see are the ones coming from neutrinos moving indistinguishably close to the speed of light. The MAJORANA experiment, shown here, has the potential to finally detect this rare decay. The little-known history of the Florida panther. it is unlikely that the neutrinos go superluminal or SR is not holding true anymore, it is unlikely that the distance is measured incorreclty, it is unlikely that the GPS setup/usage is incorrect. But experimentally, we simply dont have the capabilities to detect these slow-moving neutrinos directly. The explanation for the error provided is cogent, clear, and almost certainly correct. There is no 'T=0', and no single firing of neutrinos. New results, [+] 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. [10 Get great science journalism, from the most trusted source, delivered to your doorstep. @Hrant Khachatrian: Yes. The setup of CERN and OPERA is conceptually very simple, basically just two observers located a known distance apart with synchronized clocks. The origin of this misconception comes from a 2011 result. The speed of light in a vacuum is 299,792,458 metres per second, so the neutrinos were apparently travelling at 299,798,454 metres per second. [8] In February and March 2012, OPERA researchers blamed this result on a loose fibre optic cable connecting a GPS receiver to an Either they are wrong about either the distance (mismeasurement, or there is a spacetime "rift" within the Earth :-P) or the time (clock synchronization error or drift), or they have actually discovered superluminal neutrinos. When an atomic nucleus decayed in this fashion, it: When you added up the energy of the electron and the energy of the post-decay nucleus, including all the rest mass energy, it was always slightly less than the rest mass of the initial nucleus. If you get rid of the speed limit principle, the magnetic field cannot exist anymore. Fermilab might have a better shot. As the Earth moves we observe a dipole, and in different directions we measure different wavelengths for the same physical object (photon). If the results from OPERA are accurate, this effect would be a full-blown real Lorentz violation, not just an apparent effect like Cerenkov radiation or astronomical superluminal motion. Recent experiments show that particles should be able to go faster than light when they quantum This is a serious experiment, and these are serious people, says Smolin. The results of the neutrino experiment shook the world of physics The head of an experiment that appeared to show subatomic particles travelling faster than the speed It's a direct measurement of average velocity. In addition, this paper was signed by a large collaboration. Unauthorized use is prohibited. After tightening the connection and then measuring the time it takes data to travel the length of the fiber, researchers found that the data arrive 60 nanoseconds earlier than assumed. If a systematic error enters there though, the fact of the precision of measurement with GPS, not disputed, would be a demonstration of the difference between accuracy and precision. 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. For some long COVID patients, exercise is bad medicine, Radioactive dogs? (However, that's been perhaps the most scruntinized of all explanations). 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. It is likely to be several months before they report back. Neutrino is not faster than light. The wiggles themselves, shown with the non-wiggly part subtracted out (bottom), is dependent on the impact of the cosmic neutrinos theorized to be present by the Big Bang. [1]. When Physicists thought neutrinos were faster than the speed of light. The neutrino was first proposed in 1930, when a special type of decay beta decay seemed to violate two of the most important conservation laws of all: the conservation of energy and the conservation of momentum. It uses an experimental design that was never intended for this purpose, and that is inherently poorly suited to it; the beam pulses were 10,000 ns wide, and the shift they claim to have measured is only 60 ns. @leftaroundabout: we can only measure the speed of light in a vacuum through a vacuum. Youd never, no matter how much energy you put into yourself, be able to overtake it. Stack Exchange network consists of 181 Q&A communities including Stack Overflow, the largest, most trusted online community for developers to learn, share their knowledge, and build their careers. Elusive, nearly massive subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. The original paper publishing these findings is here: Times of Flight between a Source and a Detector observed from a GPS satelite. But light travels at a constant speed. Society for Science & the Public 20002023. Using $c_0=299792.458$ Km/s is two-way light speed, $V\;$ is the speed of the lab in relation to the CMB: $V=V_{SS}+V_E$=369$\pm$30 km/s (data from here) 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. And thats unfortunate, because detecting these low-energy neutrinos the ones that move slow compared to the speed of light would enable us to perform an important test that weve never performed before. The researchers who released this data themselves will be one of the most likely sources for resolution of the paradox. Experiments are actively looking for this. 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. But the three types of neutrino all mix together, indicating they must be massive and, furthermore, that neutrinos and antineutrinos may in fact be the same particle as one another: Majorana fermions. But must that be so? My answer is only a "would-be" consideration that, if read by the experimenters, could give them some "debug" clues. By analogy, if Einstein relativised the classical picture, how would this result "relativize" Einstein's theory of gravity? Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Moreover, as c=1/square root of(epsilon x ), if you change c with a c'>c, then you have to accept a '<, so you have to accept different intensities of magnetic fields from a given electric current, so you have to get rid of the electromagnetism, but it's describing so well the currents, the fields, the real world etc. I was quite surprised to read this all over the news today: Elusive, nearly massive subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. Neutrinos are tiny, electrically neutral particles produced in nuclear reactions. Last September, an experiment called OPERA turned up evidence that neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light (see ' Particles break light speed limit '). How could a hardware error cause a systematic bias through two different runs of the same size. It seems to indicate that you could transform a matter particle (a neutrino) into an antimatter particle (an antineutrino) simply by changing your motion relative to the neutrino. It only takes a minute to sign up. Tunnelling through a brick wall wouldn't actually violate any known law of physics, it's just sufficiently improbable according to those laws that if we ever observed it, we'd consider it more likely that our theories have to be amended than that we just have observed such an unlikely event. But for right now, with current technology, the only neutrinos (and antineutrinos) we can detect via their interactions move at speeds indistinguishable from the speed of light. Video, On board the worlds last surviving turntable ferry, AI pioneer warns of dangers as he quits Google, Shooting suspect was deported four times - US media, Photo of Princess Charlotte shared as she turns 8, Yellen warns US could run out of cash in a month, King Charles to wear golden robes for Coronation, Disney faces countersuit in feud with Florida, Explosion derails train in Russian border region, US rock band Aerosmith announce farewell tour. Nevertheless, theres a tantalizing chance we have to resolve this paradox, despite the difficulty inherent to it. And a cable can go bad if somebody hits it the wrong way with their butt while they are working in the electronics room. (I'm a theorist, BTW; you do not have to be an experimentalist to acknowledge that. The arXiv paper studied them, and seem to exclude it. I find it hard to believe its hardware. Ubuntu won't accept my choice of password. Experiments are actively looking for this. Given the sheer diversity of possible `goof-up' explanations on this page (all answers combined), I can't help feeling that we are trying to find one plausible way in which this can be MADE to look wrong. 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. Since this time is subtracted from the overall time of flight, it appears to explain the early arrival of the neutrinos. How more honest can you be? If neutrinos obey this see-saw mechanism and are Majorana particles, neutrinoless double beta decay should be possible. I found that odd given that they do have a downstream muon detector system, but they may be concerned about backgrounds. Update: Rumors seems to tell that the boring explanation is the good one. The new setup (3 ns pulses, 20 times shorter than the observed effect) has eliminated the last two points. The community was properly incredulous and the wide interest prompted a large number of other checks they could make. Frdric Grosshans links to a nice discussion by Matt Strassler Note that the author of the pre-print you link in you edit has. Until i hear or read any counter-claims to that paper, i'll consider this to be a settled matter. [ Physics Letters B 150, 431 (1985)] A comment on fermionic tachyons and Poincar representations by What one would need to explain is why hadrons and non-neutrino leptons experience exactly the same "braking" effekt as photons do. which includes this image: Standard Big Bang cosmology corresponds to =1. You would still need to explain why a massive particle (the neutrino) moves faster than a massless particle (the photon). Now, November 21, 2011, with 3ns pulses, the new value for the "missing time" is 62.1ns +/-3.7 (only 20 events). Every neutrino weve ever observed is left-handed (if you point your thumb in its direction of motion, your left hands fingers curl in the direction of its spin, or intrinsic angular momentum), and every anti-neutrino is right-handed. Please be respectful of copyright. Or was that a user edit merged into the bot's edit resulting in a misleading timeline? As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you. Neutrinos might have mass, but their mass is so small that of all the ways the Universe has to create them, only the neutrinos made in the Big Bang itself should be moving slow compared to the speed of light today. The best answers are voted up and rise to the top, Not the answer you're looking for? Does a password policy with a restriction of repeated characters increase security? In theory, because neutrinos have a non-zero rest mass, it should be possible for them to slow down to non-relativistic speeds. Physics Neutrino watch: Speed claim baffles So if this is true, it would rock the foundations of physics," said Stephen Parke, head of the theoretical physics department at the U.S. government-run Fermilab near Chicago, Illinois. Its just odd, says McFarland. and those interactions that do occur are so low in energy that we cannot presently detect them. The history of book bansand their changing targetsin the U.S. Should you get tested for a BRCA gene mutation? That mission has never been more important than it is today. The distance seems to be known within 20cm and the synchronisation seems to be within 15ns (6.9 statistical and 7.4 systematic). Either energy and momentum were being lost, and these supposedly fundamental conservation laws were no good, or there was a hitherto undetected additional particle being created that carried that excess energy and momentum away. This is not a true answer none is knowing the explanation, so far. As for distance, they use GPS readings to get the east, north, and altitude position along the path travelled to great precision.