Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Do the neutrinos break the speed of light?

Neutrinos have such small mass,
we couldn't even measure it but
constrain what it could be at most. 
Last week according to the result published by the OPERA experiment held between CERN (Geneve-Switzerland) and Gran Sasso (Italy) seems like neutrinos- created by electroweak interactions- appears like travel faster than the speed of light. The last report from that experiment suggest that neutrinos with an average energy 17GeV exceed the speed of light about 

$(v-c)/c=2.48\pm0.28(stat.)\pm0.30(sys.) \times 10^{-5}$

here $c=299\,\,\,792\,\,\,458m/s$ is the speed of light in vacuum. Neutrinos are created at CERN, and they travel to Gran Sasso about $730534.61m$ and according to the detailed analysis by OPERA experiment neutrinos exceed the speed of light by an amount of $~7435m$. That seems quite small compared to the speed of light but if it is true the implications on modern physics and the understanding of the laws of the universe are unthinkable. Therefore I would like to point out that since I see a lot of articles about Einstein implying that he was wrong or his theory just broke apart. In fact, in the article about special relativity, he never claimed that nothing could travel higher than the speed of light, contrary he claimed that nothing could accelerate and exceed the speed of light.

To be more clear I would like to write down the speed of light and the speed of neutrinos. 

speed of light         $299\,\,\,792\,\,\,458 \,m/s$
speed of neutrinos  $299\,\,\,799\,\,\,893 \,m/s$

Just notice the last four digits. If you would like to learn much about the experiment or the analysis you could read the report in arXiv.

Update: Recently the OPERA collaboration after more analysis on the data and new data, they analyzed systematic error sources and backed up their first result that neutrinos indeed travel exceeding the speed of light. Sure a lot of discussions and possible explanations for the phenomena emerge, here one of the blog pages where a lot of discussions still going on.

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