Physicists at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), the world's largest physics lab, said Thursday they have measured a special particle called neutrinos traveling faster than light. That's something that violates Einstein's 1905 special theory of relativity. The famous E = M C2 equation says it just doesn't happen.
The data was measured in a particle detector named Oscillation Project with Emulsion tRacking Apparatus (OPERA). Lurking in Italy’s subterranean Gran Sasso National Laboratory, "OPERA" attempts to detect neutrinos fired from the European particle physics laboratory, CERN through the earth! As the particles hardly interact at all with "normal" matter, neutrinos can fly right through the ground with few lost. As the neutrinos travel they will hit an atom at the right point and bounce off and lose energy. The detector at OPERA is built from gold detectors designed to sense when a neutrino hits the nucleus of a gold atom, when a gold atom is struck the computer senses a change in electrical conductance. [1] (http://www.nu.to.infn.it/exp/all/opera/#5) [2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPERA_experiment)
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Inside of the OPERA detector. Each detector is covered in Gold Foil
Over three years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. They found that, on average, the neutrinos made the 730-kilometer, 2.43-millisecond trip roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than expected if they were traveling at light speed. “It’s a straightforward time-of-flight measurement,” says Antonio Ereditato, a physicist at the University of Bern and spokesperson for the 160-member OPERA collaboration. “We measure the distance and we measure the time, and we take the ratio to get the velocity, just as you learned to do in high school.” Ereditato says the uncertainty in the measurement is 10 nanoseconds. [3] (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/neutrinos-faster-than-light/)[4] (http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR08.10E.html)
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This is the map of the electron neutrinos striking the OPERA detectors.
Right now physicists all over are declaring that it is too early to prove The Theory of Relativity wrong already. People are skeptical since the CERN researchers who conducted the experiment allowed loose tolerances up to 10 nanoseconds during the experiment. It is all about timing, timing is so crucial in this case because they measured the neutrinos a few nanoseconds faster than light. [3] (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/neutrinos-faster-than-light/)
Citations & References:
[1] http://www.nu.to.infn.it/exp/all/opera/ (http://www.nu.to.infn.it/exp/all/opera/)
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPERA_experiment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPERA_experiment)
[3] http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/neutrinos-faster-than-light (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/09/neutrinos-faster-than-light)
[4] http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR08.10E.html (http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressReleases/Releases2010/PR08.10E.html)
http://neutrino.kek.jp/figures-j.html (http://neutrino.kek.jp/figures-j.html) [images]