I find it hard to believe its hardware. xcolor: How to get the complementary color. I do not agree with the superluminal neutrinos news for very simple reasons. Anyway, I'll be interested in seeing how it pans out. But this is a positive result.". IMO what really needs to happen now is two things: (1) Other groups will try to reproduce the anomaly. Update: Rumors seems to tell that the boring explanation is the good one. It will likely take years for their experiment to yield robust results, but any events at all in excess above the expected background would be groundbreaking. And a cable can go bad if somebody hits it the wrong way with their butt while they are working in the electronics room. It would mean that the antineutrino emitted by one nucleus could, hypothetically, be absorbed (as a neutrino) by the other nucleus, and youd be able to get a decay where: There are currently multiple experiments, including the MAJORANA experiment, looking specifically for this neutrinoless double beta decay. A careless reading of the paper might make you think that it is contrary to Einstein, but it is not. No one has forgotten this. What we can learn from Chernobyl's strays. Now with these articles which I will link in this post I ask a few questions. At the same time B is in sync with C thru other paths with different lengths. Concerning your #2: they purport to have dealt with this using the shape-shape fitting between the proton current monitor and the timing of the detection. What is detected is watermark patterns in the steady stream of particles. This phenomena may have been explained. Why don't we use the 7805 for car phone chargers? "We didn't think they were, and now we have the proof," he told BBC News. (I actually had something similar happen to me on an experiment: I had an analog signal splitter "upstairs" that sent a signal echo back to my detectors "downstairs", and a runty little echoed pulse came back upstairs after about a microsecond and got processed like another event. 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". Want the full story? For decades, the neutrino was among the most puzzling and elusive of cosmic particles. Read about our approach to external linking. Can neutrinos really travel faster than the speed of light? Whether right-handed neutrinos (and left-handed antineutrinos) are real or not is an unanswered question that could unlock many mysteries about the cosmos. Once repaired, OPERA also clocked neutrinos as very close to the speed of light, but not surpassing it. conventionally. I think what is true is that the group velocity of light as assumed by the experimenters is shown to be smaller than the group velocity of the neutrinos as measured by them. All Things Neutrino was developed byFermi National Accelerator Laboratory, Americas premier laboratory for particle physics and accelerator research. MINOS will soon upgrade its equipment with snazzy new atomic clocks, says Rob Plunkett, a Fermilab physicist working on a MINOS experiment. Last (?) Last year, OPERA measured that neutrinos were making the 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip between the two labs more speedily than light, arriving there This is good because otherwise the voting process could drown out important updates that are otherwise ignored in the media. Browse other questions tagged, Start here for a quick overview of the site, Detailed answers to any questions you might have, Discuss the workings and policies of this site. Critics of the first report in September had said that the long bunches of neutrinos (tiny particles) used could introduce an error into the test. This is not a true answer none is knowing the explanation, so far. Extracting arguments from a list of function calls. But since they have mass, there is no reason that they couldnt travel at any speed. But we cant really do that in practice. Nov. 25, 2020 For the first time, the international team was able to directly observe neutrinos from this cycle (CNO Mono-Energetic Neutrinos With Enough Energy to Produce a Muon 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. What are the advantages of running a power tool on 240 V vs 120 V? They can change flavor from one type (electron, mu, tau) into another. To approach a question 400 million years in the making, researchers turned to mudskippers, blinking fish that live partially out of water. ), 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? Site design / logo 2023 Stack Exchange Inc; user contributions licensed under CC BY-SA. which includes this image: This doesn't seem right--- could a hardware problem actually do this? Weve measured neutrinos and antineutrinos produced in nuclear reactors. [+] 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. Given how big this question is, maybe it would be best to delete this answer? Update: This possibility excluded by a new experiment with 3 ns pulses. The researchers who released this data themselves will be one of the most likely sources for resolution of the paradox. Schematic illustration of nuclear beta decay in a massive atomic nucleus. Other experiments in the same neutrino beam (and elsewhere around the world) were unable to replicate the anomaly. Consequences for causality if superluminal neutrinos were explained by extra dimensions, Distance and time measurement in the famous Superluminal Neutrinos Experiment. By Geoff Brumfiel, Nature magazine on September 22, 2011. decay at the time. All experimental measures of |v-c|/c are within this limit. The initial series of experiments, comprising 15,000 separate measurements spread out over three years, found that the neutrinos arrived 60 billionths of a second faster than light would have, travelling unimpeded over the same distance. In the last many days I have seen much written about the possibilities that faster than light (FTL) neutrinos would open up. The mumblings that begin a few months after the initial report, that a loose cable caused a timing chain error, have been accepted by the experimenters. I read the published article, Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam, with their findings. 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. Instead of seeing it move away from you, youd see it move towards you. [1]. If we observe it, it will fundamentally change our perspective on the elusive neutrino. This is a place that people are examining for subtle effects. In theory, because neutrinos have a non-zero rest mass, it should be possible for them to slow down to non-relativistic speeds. E.g., the delay in the 8.3-km optical fiber has been measured both by two-way timing and using a portable clock, and it's been measured repeatedly over time so that one can rule out changes in optical properties due to aging of the plastic. This newfound behavior may offer a clue to how these reptiles will respond to a warming planet. How more honest can you be? All rights reserved. The error in the length of the bunches, however, is just the largest among several potential sources of uncertainty in the measurement, which must all now be addressed in turn; these mostly centre on the precise departure and arrival times of the bunches. Heres how, A sapphire Schrdingers cat shows that quantum effects can scale up, Doubt cast on theorized sterile particles leaves a neutrino mystery unsolved, A new experiment slashes the maximum possible mass of tiny neutrinos, How ghostly neutrinos could explain the universes matter mystery, A vegan leather made of dormant fungi can repair itself, A graphene tattoo could help hearts keep their beat, Videos of gold nanoparticles snapping together show how some crystals grow, The W boson might not be heavier than expected after all, Heres why some Renaissance artists egged their oil paintings. This image shows multiple events, and is part of the suite of experiments paving our way to a greater understanding of neutrinos. Never confirmed. 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. The journey would take a beam of light around 2.4 milliseconds to complete, but after running the Opera experiment for three years and timing the arrival of 15,000 neutrinos, the scientists have calculated that the particles arrived at Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second earlier, with an error margin of plus or minus 10 billionths of a second. Never rejected as being a fake effect. Every neutrino and antineutrino weve ever observed moves at speeds so fast theyre indistinguishable from the speed of light. @Sklivvz: a massive particle moving faster than massless photons is what also happens in Cherenkov radiation. The GERDA experiment, a decade ago, placed the strongest constraints on neutrinoless double beta [+] decay at the time. It's a direct measurement of average velocity. 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. Over 3 years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. We stop timing the neutrino when it arrives in Italy, and calculate that it moves at a speed that's comfortably below the speed of light. The solar and atmospheric neutrino experiment results are consistent with one another, but not with the full suite of neutrino data including beamline neutrinos. Everybodys bias in responding to this is going to be that this is some sort of systematic uncertainty that they didnt figure out.. and those interactions that do occur are so low in energy that we cannot presently detect them. Generating points along line with specifying the origin of point generation in QGIS. intrinsic angular momentum exhibits either clockwise or counterclockwise spin, corresponding to whether the particle in question is a neutrino or antineutrino. 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. Recent calculations also suggest that any They then traveled underground to Italys National Gran Sasso Laboratory beneath the Apennines Mountains. photomultiplier tubes lining the detector walls, showcase the successful methodology of neutrino astronomy. Concerning a previous possible tachyon observation? [The result was announced Nov. 17, and I lost my six-pack.]. 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. In other words, the more energy your neutrino has, the more likely it is to interact with you. As such, it is comparable to an object spontaneously heating up in a cold environment. Elusive, nearly massive subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. As a nonprofit news organization, we cannot do it without you. Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own. Society for Science & the Public 20002023. The OPERA experiment data showed neutrinos arriving at the detector surprisingly quickly, supposedly traveling faster thanthe speed of light. This may mean that theres much more going on in particle physics than we thought possible, says Mewes. The neutrinos are emitted on a 10.5s window, 175 times longer than the observed effect. Is the wave-particle duality a real duality? One popular discussion is of "Faster than light propulsion". It is less important that the rotation of the Earth. Neutrinos in the MINOS experiment cover 735 kilometers, about the same distance as CERNs experiment. It will likely take years for their experiment to yield robust results, but any events at all in excess above the expected background would be groundbreaking. The neutrinos shaved about 60 nanoseconds off that time, according to atomic clocks at either end synchronized by a satellite. @dmckee: The "partial apology and retraction" is not an apology or a retraction. 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. But if the neutrino has a non-zero rest mass, you should be able to boost yourself to move faster than the neutrino is moving. What happened to the idea of tachyonic or other superluminal neutrinos? Alternatively, its possible that there really could be right-handed neutrinos and left-handed antineutrinos, and that weve just never seen them for some reason. So given a constant density of vacuum particles, the speed of light through the vacuum would always be constant. Inside South Africas skeleton trade. Neutrinos travel through 700km of rock before reaching Gran Sasso's underground laboratories, Science and technology reporter, BBC News. In 2007 the MINOS experiment turned up hints of neutrinos traveling impossibly fast between the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and a mine in Minnesota. The first announcement of evidently faster-than-light neutrinos caused a stir worldwide; the Opera collaboration is very aware of its implications if eventually proved correct. [8] In February and March 2012, OPERA researchers blamed this result on a loose fibre optic cable connecting a GPS receiver to an @MSalters: I agree. 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. 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 remnant of supernova 1987a, located in the Large Magellanic Cloud some 165,000 light years away. Therefore, there's a mistake in the computation of the speed of neutrinos, in the calculations on the run lenght, in the interaction time calculations, during the generation and also the detection of those evanescent particles! It only takes a minute to sign up. The three types of neutrino almost certainly have different masses from one another, where the heaviest a neutrino is allowed to be is about 1/4,000,000th the mass of an electron, the next-lightest particle. Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics. If neutrinos can move faster than light (FTL) it does not provide a means for FTL propulsion. It's not them. There is no 'T=0', and no single firing of neutrinos. (If the result is wrong, then it should be independent of the energy.). Ask him to bet against the new results, though, and he says hed be willing to bet his house. Only one ancient account mentions the existence of Xerxes Canal, long thought to be a tall tale. WebNeutrinos dont interact with matter much so basically pass right through. Neutrinos and antineutrinos come in a wide variety of energies, and the odds of having a neutrino interact with you increase with a neutrinos energy. @jonathan I'll delete my answer if neutrinos travelling faster than c is confirmed, big question or not ;). 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. This paper (Cosmological Principle and Relativity - Part I) analyses the anisotropy of light speed for a moving observer. ", Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus, or OPERA, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information. It's just unlikely, very unlikely, just as the 4-sigma evidence for new CP violation in like-sign dimuons was possible, only to fall flat on its face when ATLAS and CMS failed to see the same thing. 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. New data, however, will be needed to confirm this hypothesis. A new discovery raises a mystery. 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. 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. 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. Usually, you just lose some pulses travelling down the cable. But light travels at a constant speed. I really have a hard time imagining a plausible "goof" explanation at this point. As the Earth moves we observe a dipole, and in different directions we measure different wavelengths for the same physical object (photon). All rights reserved, "Proton Smaller Than ThoughtMay Rewrite Laws of Physics. The new findings come from four experiments that study streams of neutrinos sent from CERN in Geneva to the INFN Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. To save chestnut trees, we may have to play God, Why you should add native plants to your garden, What you can do right now to advocate for the planet, Why poison ivy is an unlikely climate change winner, The gory history of Europes mummy-eating fad, This ordinary woman hid Anne Frankand kept her story alive, This Persian marvel was lost for millennia. Have a comment, question, or suggestion for the team behind All Things Neutrino?Email us. @Carl: and this is supposed to make one trust their report, independent measurement by the ICARUS collaboration, Times of Flight between a Source and a Detector observed from a GPS satelite, Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam, arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1109/1109.4897.pdf, Cosmological Principle and Relativity - Part I, Improving the copy in the close modal and post notices - 2023 edition, New blog post from our CEO Prashanth: Community is the future of AI. Why do the neutrinos (with mass) from a supernova arrive before the light (no mass)? After all, this isnt the first report of improbably speedy neutrinos. Axolotls and capybaras are TikTok famousis that a problem? Heres where the disconnect between theory and experiment lies. What one would need to explain is why hadrons and non-neutrino leptons experience exactly the same "braking" effekt as photons do. Imagine that youve got a neutrino, and youre traveling behind it. (Related: "Proton Smaller Than ThoughtMay Rewrite Laws of Physics."). How do we reverse the trend? You may opt-out by. The streams at the input and output are time stamped using the same satellites and any position along each stream has a precise time associated with it. The OPERA team later discovered a faulty piece of equipment (a cable) was responsible for the timing mismatch. (However, that's been perhaps the most scruntinized of all explanations). EDIT it seems this effect is settled to be a missing correction due to sattelite-speed terms: http://arxiv.org/abs/1110.2685. (Unless the neutrinos are tachyons; in that case, I guess Lorentz invariance is technically still intact, but the observation of a tachyon would be equally big news.). [10 But archaeology is confirming that Persia's engineering triumph was real. [This paragraph is disproved by the Nov. 17 result.] If neutrinos obey this see-saw mechanism and are Majorana particles, neutrinoless double beta decay should be possible. If so, the observation would 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? (2) OPERA should try to verify that the anomaly has an energy dependence. Or was that a user edit merged into the bot's edit resulting in a misleading timeline? I can assure you that the OPERA people are acutely and painfully aware of the long history of highly "significant" bumps just going away. "Assumed" because there is no discussion of the effect of the collective refraction index due to the atmosphere, ionosphere, magnetic field (and maybe etc) of the earth in the measure of time they use. 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. is this the result of the experiment you're talking about? level 2. It would be one hell of a kick-up-Einsten's-backside violation of Lorentz invariance. Independent measurements were performed. There's no complicated theoretical analysis that needs to be done to determine whether the speed of light was exceeded. And every neutrino weve ever observed moves at speeds indistinguishable from the speed of light. Connect and share knowledge within a single location that is structured and easy to search. Is climate change killing Australian wine? 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. @Lagerbaer I think the trajectory is all underground it starts in a deep tunnel at CERN and ends under a mountain at Gran Sasso :-). It makes sense that a neutrino is not subject to the same interactions, given its famed reluctance to interact with anything. A claim that neutrinos traveled faster than the speed of light would be revolutionary if true, but "I would bet against it," physicist says. Science at its best. The new, preliminary result shows that neutrinos arrived at OPERA 1.6 nanoseconds slower than light would have, with an error of 6.2 nanoseconds. I believe this question needs a couple of years more investigation. But must that be so? This image shows multiple events, and is part of the suite of experiments paving our way to a greater understanding of neutrinos. General: The neutrino as a tachyon by A. Chodos et al. VideoOn board the worlds last surviving turntable ferry, I didnt think make-up was made for black girls, Why there is serious money in kitchen fumes. Explore in 3D: The dazzling crown that makes a king. It was also extensively documented at every 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. Note that if there is a dark matter/neutrino interaction present, the acoustic scale could be altered. Recent experiments show that particles should be able to go faster than light when they quantum 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.). Last year, OPERA measured that neutrinos were making the 454-mile (730-kilometer) underground trip between the two labs more speedily than light, arriving there Now, November 21, 2011, with 3ns pulses, the new value for the "missing time" is 62.1ns +/-3.7 (only 20 events). By analogy, if Einstein relativised the classical picture, how would this result "relativize" Einstein's theory of gravity? Ubuntu won't accept my choice of password. Confirmation of the results would be exciting news for theoretical physicists such as Matthew Mewes of Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania, who have long played around with ways to modify relativity. Free. The OPERA experiment data showed neutrinos arriving at the detector surprisingly quickly, supposedly traveling faster than the speed of light. Get great science journalism, from the most trusted source, delivered to your doorstep. ", 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. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. 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. Does a password policy with a restriction of repeated characters increase security? particles from one another. ', referring to the nuclear power plant in Ignalina, mean? There was no other explanation of the glitch in the arrangement of the SQUID, but a capture of one monopole. There are strong reasons for disbelieving this result. For some long COVID patients, exercise is bad medicine, Radioactive dogs? I will bet all my beans into the idea that they didn't estimate the spacetime curvature inside the earth well and over the beam trajectory, and what they actually discovered is a great way to measure space-time inside the Earth. 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. How to take into account the reference frames with the revolution and rotation of the Earth in OPERA's superluminal neutrinos? a neutrino) would we be able to measure a higher speed. Science News was founded in 1921 as an independent, nonprofit source of accurate information on the latest news of science, medicine and technology. Until i hear or read any counter-claims to that paper, i'll consider this to be a settled matter. Its just odd, says McFarland. 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''. 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. 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. If I were conspiratorially minded, I would say they are covering up an uncorrected relativistic effect with a bogus story of a hardware error. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein's theory of special relativity, which demands that nothing can travel faster than light. Afaik the only known measures of the c are done in a two-way version (mean value in a closed path). Parabolic, suborbital and ballistic trajectories all follow elliptic paths. However, slow-moving neutrinos cannot produce a detectable signal in this fashion. Ask Ethan: Do Neutrinos Always Travel At Nearly The Speed Of Light? The difference they found with respect to the speed of light is very small, so some errors in the calulations must have been made. The neutrino might not actually be travelling as far as they think if space/time is contracted at one or more points along the path where gravity varies. A bad cable connector can take a beautiful digital logic signal and reflect part of it back to the emitter, in a time-dependent way, turning the received signal into an analog mess with a complicated shape. As the neutrino experiment goes by, we start timing one of the neutrinos as it exits the source in Switzerland. Its possible to have an unstable atomic nucleus that doesnt just undergo beta decay, but double beta decay: where two neutrons in the nucleus simultaneously both undergo beta decay. 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.
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