tank that serves as the target for the experiment, where a neutrino interaction will produce fast-moving charged particles that can then be detected by the surrounding photomultiplier tubes at the ends. By analogy, if Einstein relativised the classical picture, how would this result "relativize" Einstein's theory of gravity? In other words, the more energy your neutrino has, the more likely it is to interact with you. If confirmed by other experiments, the find could undermine one of the basic principles of modern physics. First off, they cannot be zero. Never confirmed. How to take into account the reference frames with the revolution and rotation of the Earth in OPERA's superluminal neutrinos? The MAJORANA experiment, shown here, has the potential to finally detect this rare decay. Over 3 years, OPERA researchers timed the roughly 16,000 neutrinos that started at CERN and registered a hit in the detector. Several of my colleague suspect there may be a subtle effect hiding here, but it is not as if they didn't think of it. The neutrinos are little affected by matter and seem to be covering more "meters" than vacuum meters. Send in your Ask Ethan questions to startswithabang at gmail dot com! It was also extensively documented at every I was quite surprised to read this all over the news today: Elusive, nearly massive subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. Five different teams of physicists have now independently verified that elusive subatomic particles called neutrinos do not travel faster than light. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. That mission has never been more important than it is today. I wound up spending several thousand dollars on signal terminators to swallow the echo downstairs. ), This is inspirational (for theorists and experimentalists alike) :D. MINOS is reporting a completely independent (different beam as well as different detectors) measurement as of July 2015: Are the observers using exactly identical detectors? Neutrinos are, however, the most common particle That's the correct design if you want to measure the speed of the neutrinos reliably. Suppose this is real, that the neutrinos arrive very slightly faster than light would through the vacuum. Those bunches lasted 10 millionths of a second - 160 times longer than the discrepancy the team initially reported in the neutrinos' travel time. You have a few longer answers which were already updated, but here is a concise statement of the situation in mid-2014: An independent measurement by the ICARUS collaboration, also using neutrinos traveling from CERN to Gran Sasso but using independent detector and timing hardware, found detection times "compatible with the simultaneous arrival of all events with equal speed, the one of light.".