Faster-than-light neutrino experiment to be run again
Baku, October 31 (AZERTAC). Scientists who announced that sub-atomic particles might be able to travel faster than light are to rerun their experiment in a different way.
This will address criticisms and allow the physicists to shore up their analysis as much as possible before submitting it for publication.
Dr Sergio Bertolucci said it was vital not to "fool around" given the staggering implications of the result.
So they are doing all they can to rule out more pedestrian explanations.
Physicists working on the Opera experiment announced the perplexing findings last month.
Neutrinos sent through the ground from Cern (the home of the Large Hadron Collider) in Geneva toward the Gran Sasso laboratory 732km away in Italy seemed to show up a tiny fraction of a second earlier than light would have.
The speed of light is widely regarded as the Universe`s ultimate velocity limit. Outlined first by James Clerk Maxwell and then by Albert Einstein in his theory of special relativity, much of modern physics relies on the idea that nothing can travel faster than light.
Dr Bertolucci, the director of research at Cern, told BBC News: "In the last few days we have started to send a different time structure of the beam to Gran Sasso.
The neutrinos showed up 60 nanoseconds (60 billionths of a second) earlier than light would have over the same distance.
However, the time measurement is not direct; the researchers cannot know how long it took an individual neutrino to travel from Switzerland to Italy.
Cern`s director of research says the new experimental design will be more efficient
One of the main challenges to the collaboration`s work comes from Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and his Boston University colleague Andrew Cohen.
In a recent paper, the physicists argue that if neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light, they would rapidly lose energy, depleting the beam of more energetic particles. This phenomenon was not seen by the Opera experiment.
This result helped to spur the development of the radical new theory of special relativity.
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