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io9 Link: CERN Recorded Faster Than Light Particles
[Scoop Update: The OPERA paper Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam is now available.
There is also a discussion of the issues at Discover Magazine's Bad Astronomy blog: "Faster-than-light travel discovered? Slow down, folks".]
Radio New Zealand audio: Simon Mercerpt interviews University of Auckland Physicist David Krofcheck:
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Scientific breakthrough: Physicists at CERN have recorded particles moving faster than light
Looks like Einstein may have been wrong — An international team of scientists at CERN has just announced that they've recorded neutrino particles traveling faster than the speed of light.
[…]
io9 spoke with James Gillies — head of communications and spokesman for CERN — about the team's results.
"It's important to make clear is that nobody is claiming a discovery, or any contradiction with relativity," explained Gillies. "The OPERA experiment has a measurement they can't account for, so they're opening it up for further scrutiny, and hopefully an independent measurement from another lab."
[…]
CERN provides the OPERA experiment with an energetic beam of pure muon-neutrinos. This beam travels a distance of 732 km to an underground lab in Gran Sasso, Italy, where scientists observe how many of the original muon-neutrinos have transmutated into oscillated tau-neutrinos. Shown here is the OPERA detector located in the Gran Sasso underground labs.
All told, the neutrinos take just 3 milliseconds to make the trip from Geneva to Gran Sasso. But in the course of performing their experiments, Ereditato and his colleagues noticed that the neutrinos were consistently arriving in Gran Sasso 60 billionths of a second ahead of schedule, i.e. 60 nanoseconds faster than light would over the same distance.
According to the BBC, Ereditato has referred to his team's findings as "an apparently unbelievable result," but after 15,000 measurements the researchers' findings look surprisingly sound.
[…]
The team has opted to make their results available online, allowing other physicists to more closely inspect and verify their results, and will hold a seminar at CERN tomorrow to discuss their findings. The seminar will be broadcast live at webcast.cern.ch starting at 16:00 CEST.
Want to know more about what neutrinos are? Read io9's Field Guide to Subatomic Particles.
Could this possibly lead to faster-than-light travel? io9's resident physicist, Dave Goldberg, explains why that's not likely. (Sorry!)
[Full article: http://io9.com/5842947/]
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