Breaking the Speed of Light

Forgive the slowness of this report :)

Breaking the Speed of Light "An international team of scientists at the Gran Sasso research facility outside of Rome announced today that they have clocked neutrinos traveling faster than the speed of light. The neutrinos, subatomic particles with very little mass, were contained within beams emitted from CERN 730 km (500 miles) away in Switzerland. Over a period of three years, 15,000 neutrino beams were fired from CERN at special detectors located deep underground at Gran Sasso. Where light would have made the trip in 2.4 thousandths of a second, the neutrinos made it in 60 nanoseconds – that’s 60 billionths of a second – a tiny difference to us but a huge difference to particle physicists! The implications of such a discovery are staggering, as it would effectively undermine Einstein’s theory of relativity and force a rewrite of the Standard Model of physics."

Other reports I've seen have mostly said that the neutrinos arrived 60ns faster than expected, not that they travelled the distance in 60ns. I tried to check the paper, but it's pretty far above my head. From the abstract: "This anomaly corresponds to a relative difference of the muon neutrino velocity with respect to the speed of light (v-c)/c = (2.48 ± 0.28 (stat.) ± 0.30 (sys.)) ×10^-5."

As usual, the Economist has the best layman's description I've seen, There was a neutrino named Bright. Here's a quick calculation from a theoretical physicist that puts the results in some context.

They've checked the results for a few years and haven't found a mistake, so now they're hoping someone else can find a flaw or reproduce the results. As the BBC reports: "My dream would be that another, independent experiment finds the same thing - then I would be relieved," Dr Ereditato said. But for now, he explained, "we are not claiming things, we want just to be helped by the community in understanding our crazy result - because it is crazy".

Here's the site of the experiment, OPERA.