‘Neutrinos still faster than light’
The claim that certain high-energy particles break the light-barrier has been strengthened after a fine-tuned re-test bore the same results.
In September, physicists part of the Opera experiment at the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy reported that neutrinos fired from Cern in Geneva 750 km away, reached their detector 60 billionth of a second faster than light would. The finding sent a nervous ripple across the world as it entails that neutrinos disobey Einstein’s special theory of relativity and more worrisomely crashes through the fundamental principle of cause and effect.
The Opera team ran the experiment again with recommended modifications in the design to rule out one of the possibilities of error, in hope to improve accuracy. This time fewer neutrinos were fired from Geneva, in shorter pulses lasting only 3 billionth of a second, compared to 10 millionth of a second pulses used in the original experiment. These fine-tuned pulses also had a larger gap of 524 nanoseconds between them. The detector at Sasso reported the exact same results- the neutrinos had a shorter travel time than light would in vacuum along the same course.
“The positive outcome of the test makes us more confident in the result, although a final word can only be said by analogous measurements performed elsewhere in the world,” said Fernando Ferroni, president of the Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics. The results were posted on arXiv.org on Friday morning, and the paper has been submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics, yet to undergo the peer review process. Various other sources of error have been pointed out by onlooking experts.
One sceptic clan questions the recording of time, explaining that differential gravity at the source and the detector can put the clocks used on separate plains. Labs in Japan and USA have planned other retests.
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