CERN team claims measurement of neutrino speed >c

Haelfix

The bottomline is there is no way this can work theoretically. You could for instance look for departures from Lorentz invariance, but that's already been searched for ad naeusum through several different channels. No known violation of the SR dispersion relations have ever been discovered, and the bounds are already far in excess of the sensitivity of this experiment.

It also contradicts well established neutrino measurements, like the Supernova ones. Trying to stay consistent with that, leads you into real absurdities (like modifying standard MSW physics in violent ways)

seerongo

Thanks for clarifying that.

So now that the paper clears that up, it appears the photon can resume it's original svelte, speedy status as "c". This sure is starting to look like an error in position measurement. Not as much fun, but still would be important, since they must have been closely studying that possibility all along.

I suppose the little ones could be taking an extra-dimensional short cut or a convenient worm hole, but they'd all have to be taking the same short cut every time for years. I dunno...

Thanks to those who are summarizing the paper's details for us non-physicists.

qsa

http://indico.cern.ch/conferenceDisp...?confId=155620

Chronos

Agreed, the OPERA team is seeking confirmation [I agree with Pallen it appears unlikely]. Neutrino detection is tricky business and correlating capture with emission is no easy task. I can't help but wonder how many of the detected neutrinos were actually emitted by CERN and how that might skew the measurement. There was a paper about 10 years ago about neutrinos as tachyons by Chodos, IIRC.

seerongo

My background is engineering, not physics, but frankly, the method used to correlate the proton extractions with the v detections doesn't seem that bad to me so far, although at first blush, 16,111 detected events doesn't seem too great statistically. I'd like to see more expert comments on that however. Regarding potential contamination, would most contamination come from B-decay, which would be anti's? I think they accounted for anti's, counting about 2% unless I read it wrong. Could someone comment on that? I'm not sure about the potential sources of spurious neutrinos in significant numbers.

I'm more struck by the timing aspects. There seem to be so many places in this system where inaccuracies can gang up on you. This is a pretty complex system with a lot of timing points, all with tolerances. I'd be the last person to second guess this work, but I think that's where I'd look.

Gilles

I think the question of clock synchronization may be tricky. In GR, there is no absolute definition of simultaneity. Due to differences in gravitational potential, as mentioned, clocks evolves differently at different points. So you must periodically resynchronize them, but how ? there is no unique choice, and the measured time of flight probably depends of how you define the timescale at each point.

Parlyne

I'm afraid that's already ruled as a reasonable explanation for this by supernova 1987A. The problem is that the speed of a tachyon is given by

[tex]v = c\sqrt{1+\frac{|m^2|c^4}{E^2}}[/tex].

This means that a tachyon's speed increases as its energy decreases. As noted above, the OPERA neutrinos have higher energy than the 1987A neutrinos, meaning that, were they tachyonic, they should be slower, not faster, than the supernova neutrinos. But, in fact, the 1987A neutrinos have a discrepancy from c that is, at worst, something like 4 orders of magnitude smaller than the OPERA discrepancy.

JordanL

Anyone suggesting that simply adjusting the "c" constant will fix things needs to explain how 150 years of mathematical and physics equations didn't detect the discrepancy.

Looking to an adjustment to c as the answer to this data, if correct, is... creative. It is not borne out of a dedication to science but a fear of change, as given data like this, that is certainly not the most likely cause, even within our CURRENT theories.

Dmitry67

What if neutrinos are very high energy tachions, so we never noticed that they are moving slightly faster than c? We can't detect low energy neutrinos, so usually dont see them moving much faster than c.

JordanL

I believe someone else already asked this question. The answer that was given is that tachyons decrease in energy as they increase in speed. Using the neutrinos detected from the referenced supernova, were they tachyonic, the neutrinos should have been traveling even faster than the ones CERN is talking about. Instead we saw them arrive simultaneously with the photons.

Demystifier

The idea that neutrinos are tachyons is not new. Many papers already exist:
http://xxx.lanl.gov/find/hep-ph/1/ti.../0/1/0/all/0/1

TrickyDicky

It is reasonable that after this kind of announcements people starts getting nervous and all kind of silly things are said. Maybe it is not so normal that knowledgeable people first reaction to this apparently "FTL neutrinos" be that SR must be modified, or everything that was measured so far to a certain accuracy is now wrong. It is not. Let's listen to Vanadium 50 here.
First thing to rule out is obviously some kind of error in the measurement, and this is explicit in most posts. Even if no measurement error is found, we must first look for explanations that are compatible with the accuracy level of thousands of previous experiments that can't just be ignored.
So far little attention has been focused to the special nature of the subject particle, the neutrino and the way it is measured, I would say that this is the weakest link of the chain if no obvious claculational or silly error is found so I think the first serious theoretical searches must come from this side rather than question relativity.

Chi Meson

Thank you for posting this! I was pouring through all this info, with this same obvious fact in mind, wondering what I missed. The neutrino burst is part of the standard method for studying Type 2 supernovae in other galaxies, and they all arrive, exactly according to precise calculations, after the light gets here. So granted there's plenty I don't know or understand about the data, but place me in the camp that thinks a systematic error is to blame, rather than derailment of SR.

But hey, I'm a good little scientist--I'll leave the door open.

MarcoD

The fact that particles arrive at the same moment from supernovae is a compelling argument it is a fluke, unfortunately. Success to you all.

suprised

To be sure: it is not CERN who is claiming this, but a team outside of CERN, and all what CERN does is to provide a platform for today's press conference. Unfortunately so, and many colleagues strongly object this. Of course this is being mixed up all over in the media, as usual. Incidentally neither the General Director nor the research director will be present.

xts

Seems that I am only one here who bothered to read OPERA preprint: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1109/1109.4897.pdf

Just some points after reading:

1. There is no information what reference frame they use for analysis and how they covered relativistic effects in their analysis:
CERN? Gran-Sasso? Centre-of-Earth? Solar System?
Please note, that SR time dilation between CERN and Gran-Sasso frames is 10 times stronger than the effect they report. How the clocks were corrected for dilation?
There is also no information if GR effects were taken into account.

2. There is no discussion about systematic errors which may be caused by delays in readout electronics and scintillators itself (except of light propagation, which is the only one discussed). The systematic error caused by DAQ and detectors is estimated as for few ns each, which seems to be too optimistic.

3. Detailed experimental setup is delegated to other paper not available online.

dgwsoft

My first thought was perhaps photons do no travel at "the speed of light", ie photons have (rest) mass.

According to wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon#...on_photon_mass the experimental limit is at least as good as m < 1e-14 eV/c^2

I could not find a formula to convert photon mass into speed, but I think I have worked it out:

(v/c) = SQRT( (1+d^2)/(1+2d^2) ) where d = Lmc/h (L = wavelength, m = photon rest mass, c = "cosmic speed limit for which we need to find a new name", h = Planks constant).

For small d this approximates to v/c = 1 - d^2/2

Using the mass given above and for a green photon of wavelength 500nm that comes out as one part in about 10^30, much smaller than the 20 parts in a million quoted for the neutrinos.

To look at it the other way, for a photon to be travelling 6000m/s slower then true "c" would require it to have a rest mass of about 1.5e-2 ev/c^2 which would have been noticed.

However my SR is a bit rusty so if anyone wants to check this I would be grateful.

(AIUI it is not significant that light is observed to travel "at c" because since there is no evidence (as yet) that photons have mass, we have just taken "c" to be the speed of light).