Finding puts brakes on faster-than-light neutrinos

An independent experiment confirms that subatomic particles have wrong energy spectrum for superluminal travel.

The claim that neutrinos can travel faster than light has been given a knock by an independent experiment.

On 17 October, the Imaging Cosmic and Rare Underground Signals (ICARUS) collaboration submitted a paper1 to the preprint server arXiv.org, in which it offered a rebuttal of claims2 to have clocked subatomic particles called neutrinos travelling faster than the speed of light. The original results were published on 22 September by the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-Tracking Apparatus (OPERA) experiment.

Both experiments are based at Gran Sasso National Laboratory near L'Aquila, Italy, and detect neutrinos coming in a beam from CERN, Europe's high-energy particle physics laboratory near Geneva in Switzerland, about 730 kilometres away. Unlike OPERA, ICARUS does not measure the neutrinos' speed directly. Instead, it has shown that the energy spectrum of the neutrinos does not exhibit an effect predicted last month3 by Andrew Cohen and Sheldon Glashow, theoretical physicists at Boston University in Massachusetts.

If the Cohen–Glashow effect is a valid prediction, "neutrinos are not superluminal," says Sandro Centro, a physicist at the University of Padua in Italy, deputy spokesman for ICARUS and a co-author of the latest paper.

Cohen says that an energy spectrum provided by OPERA showed the same inconsistency, and that the spectrum from ICARUS has added to the problem. "There's always value to having things checked independently," says Cohen. "I think it's great ICARUS has done this so quickly."

The Cohen–Glashow effect is an extension of another phenomenon, well known to physicists. The speed of light travelling through materials such as water is lower than that in a vacuum, and charged particles such as electrons are able to exceed this lower speed when travelling through the medium. When they do...

Here we go again ... Dueling Hypotheses at High Noon !!!

One guy claims to measure the speed of neutrinos traveling about 100 kilometers with accuracy resembling .00000001% of C. He then speculates that the results suggest they exceeded C by a significant, perhaps even meaningful amount which seems to overturn Physics As We Know It. Oh, my ! Whatever will we DO ?

Another guy comes along and points out that, while he wasn’t actually trying to clock the neutrinos ( within the same experimental regime ) he DID somehow manage to characterize them accurately enough ( as they went zipping by ) to speculate that they failed to adhere to the speculations of some OTHER guys — who weren’t even there — but STILL think they know what a superluminal neutrino MUST look and act like.

1st guy: Man, look at that superluminal neutrino’s ET ! He got here before he even left the Line ! All RIGHT !!!

2d guy: Man, that ain’t no superluminal neutrino — if he DID try to go that fast, my buddy over there thinks his wheels would fall off, at least !!!

1st guy: But ... but ... I got him clocked on the scoreboard over there ! I got him goin’ over the line in my camera, Dude !!!

2d guy: Sorry, man. Must have been some other dude’s ride ‘cause your guy’s wheels must have fallen off before you even clocked him.

And so it goes ...

One Man’s Opinion

21stCenturion

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