This article has left out important details. The neutrinos did not "start out within" with long pulses of protons -- they were created by those pulses, when the protons slammed into a graphite target. And long pulses were necessary to generate enough neutrinos to detect how often they transmuted between electron- and muon-neutrinos during the trip from Switzerland to Italy, which was the original purpose of this experiment.
This speed oddity was totally unexpected, and not part of the original experiment. Remember, if most of the neutrinos can pass through >700 km of rock, most of them will also pass undetected right through the lab's detector in Gran Sasso. So a large number of neutrinos was need. But the new experiment wont bother with detecting the flavor of the neutrinos, only their travel time, so fewer will be needed, therefore a shorter proton pulse can be used.
It would have been nice if the author had done another 10 minutes of research and mentioned that this result will also be re-tested next year with higher-precision atomic clocks by three groups of experimentalists: Gran Sasso, the US (Fermilab MINOS) and Japan (T2K).
The Swiss physics lab says it will send the subatomic particles packing one more time to try to spot mistakes in last month’s blazing discovery.
CERN scientists are so baffled by the neutrinos that appear to have travelled faster than light that they’re running the experiment again, with a twist.
When the Geneva physics lab first announced its perplexing findings last month, it appealed to scientists around the world to help spot flaws that would disprove the results.
In response, physicists have postulated everything from basic miscalculations to esoteric explanations that the neutrinos burrowed through some undiscovered dimension.
Now, according to the BBC, CERN will try to repeat the results running an experiment that will be slightly different from the original.
Last month’s findings came through serendipity. CERN had sent the neutrinos on an underground journey from Geneva to Italy’s Gran Sasso lab 455 miles (732 km) away near Rome, in order to note how many of them would flip from a muon state to a tau (diagram above).
But the neutrinos shocked the researchers by arriving 60 nanoseconds (60 billionths of a second) faster than the speed of light. If the result stands, it would upset Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity that states that nothing travels faster than light does in a vacuum. The theory underpins much of modern physics.
CERN researcher Dario Autiero was surprised by the results.
Neutrinos are subatomic particles that can travel through gaps in atoms and through earth, which is how they ploughed under the Alps.
In the original experiment, the neutrinos started out within comparatively long pulses of proton beams before escaping and heading to Gran Sasso. Because the pulse lasts a long time the scientists had to take an average of neutrino departure and arrival times to make their calculations – a process that could be flawed, the BBC notes.
In the new experiment, CERN will fire the proton beams in much shorter pulses, so that they can more accurately pinpoint a neutrino’s departure time.
CERN plans to complete the experiment by the end of November.
Images: CERN
Additional blazing neutrinos:
- Faster-than-light neutrinos come down to earth
- New dimensions on the speed of light
- Get ready for time travel
And some antimatter musings:
