An image from the Hubble Space Telescope showing Supernova 1987A. Researchers suggest that if neutrinos travelled faster than the speed of light, they would have arrived and been detected much earlier than they were following this cosmic explosion.
Credit: NASA, ESA, and P. Challis (Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics)
SYDNEY: Experimental results showing faster-than-light neutrinos has been met with widespread scepticism, that will likely continue until results can be verified.
Neutrinos are chargeless subatomic particles that come in three 'flavours', and are known to travel at close to the speed of light, although an exact speed is difficult to assign due to their unknown mass.
However, an early report by physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Switzerland has announced experimental data that purports to show neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light.
The speed of light is often quoted as being a 'hard limit' of velocity, an upper bound that nothing can exceed without breaking the laws of physics.
If found to be correct, the new results, now posted on the physics website arXiv, would require a major rethink of the current model of special relativity. But what avenues exist for confirming the extraordinary data?
Estimating error
Jenny Thomas, co-spokesperson for the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) experiment operating out of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois, said the results had been seen before.
"In 2011 we did this measurement and we also saw this value of super luminal velocity. But we had very large systematic errors, so we dismissed it. Because it's so very unlikely that these things go faster than the speed of light."
Rob Plunkett, MINOS' other co-spokesperson, confirmed this. "We did a measurement of this ourselves and we had errors of 70 nanoseconds," he said. "Which is seven times what they claimed at CERN."
He says the difference is that CERN scientists used a more modern timing method. The margin of error in timing, which is done with GPS technology, can be attributed to "a relative jitter in the arrival time" of the particles, explained Plunkett, and also a lack of certainty about the exact starting time.
CERN sent the neutrino from their facility on the Swiss-French border across 732 km to the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) detector built within the core of a mountain in central Italy.
Improving the timing
Plunkett said the MINOS team now has the capability to return and analyse the data they've already taken to reduce the margin of error in their earlier experiments by a factor of two - and in future, will reduce the margin of error even further.
"With atomic clocks we propose that we can get the margin of error down to one nanosecond, [most] likely in the next few years," said Plunkett.
Testing these results will now be a top priority for physicists working on experiments that have the capability to do so, such as MINOS and T2K in Japan - a long-range neutrino experiment.
"This will escalate our priority remarkably. We'll be going at it hammer and tongs for the next few months," said Plunkett, adding: "If such a thing is going to exist it has to be looked at immediately."
Explosive astronomical evidence
Nicole Bell, a senior lecturer in theoretical particle physics at the University of Melbourne in Australia, pointed to an example from astronomy that seems to refute the latest results.
It comes from a star that went supernova in 1987 within the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.
Supernovae are formed when stars explode as they get too large or reach the end of their lives. As part of the radiation emitted when they do this, they release neutrinos and light.
The Kamioka Nucleon Decay Experiment detector in Japan picked up neutrinos from the explosion three hours before light from supernova event reached Earth.
"However, this does not mean the neutrinos travelled faster than the speed of light. It just means that the neutrinos left the supernova first, while the light was trapped in the supernova for longer before it could get out," said Bell.
If the neutrinos from the explosion actually had been travelling faster than the speed of light, like the CERN experiment suggests, they would have reached Earth years, rather than hours, before the light did, explained Bell.
"In a way, you can regard the supernova observation as an independent experiment result which refutes the OPERA measurement."
The neutrinos arrived about
The neutrinos arrived about 18 hours before there was any visible indication of the explosion.
Neutrinos faster than light
It is not surprising to find that neutrinos are faster than light as they do not react or interact with practically anything. And as such the neutrinos may actually be faster than light probably because their vacuum impedance is less than that of photons.
neutrinos
The argument that neutrinos arrived a few hours before electrons could be because they were discharged sooner. Obviously could alternatively be argued that neutrinos were discharged two years later but caught up.
Faster than light neutrinos
Dr Looi HW
Although I still feel that neutrinos can go faster than light because their vacuum impedance is less than that of light photons, here is another possibility that needs to be considered:
What if I pretend that I am an innocent little boy who knows nothing much, but who thinks that neutrinos can go faster than light because neutrinos do not really exist as such, but are actually nothing more than just pulses of energy that is transmitted along an almost infinitely strong and rigid "needle" of length which varies from a few microns to billions of miles and which is incredibly thin.
These needles could be made of stacks of Higgs Bosoms and fill up throughout the universe to form the so-called Higgs Field.
Since the needles are almost infinitely stiff, if energy is applied to one end of these needles, the energy pulse ("neutrinos thus created") would be transmitted almost instantly to the other end and if the other end is associated with an electron in the detector material, the energy would be converted into matter and appears as an electron neutrino. If the other end is associated with a muon or tau particle, the energy pulse ("neutrino") would be converted into a muon or tau neutrino.
If we have a bundle which is made up of these needles of varying lengths, and if we have "neutrino" detectors along the whole length of the bundle we will be detecting neutrinos of different types along the length of the bundle. This could explain why neutrinos appear to change flavours or oscillate as they move along. And this could also explain why neutrinos can pass though a large mass like planet earth as the earth is already being pierced by trillions upon trillions of these almost infinitely stiff needles that form the fabric of space.
the neutrinos must to break speed-light limit
is possible that there are some antineutrinos that travel faster than the
speed of light,changing ours concepts of spacetime.we might to rethink the STR,because there are new motives to think that the neutrinos-antineutrinos violate the symmetry cp.we might rethink the junction of space and time,as well the asymmetry of space and time for particles travelling with speeds nearest the light speed.then occur the asymmetry of exchange of mass into energy and viceversa.would be the spins linked to the its changes of helicities with the speed of light in the 4-dimensional manifold?