A colleague of mine sent me the (official(?)) report below.
Anyway,
a few (perhaps) trivia check-questions:
Is the
tunnel or wherever the bean is observed, as it was? Has it been
shortened or stretched somehow, by natural accident?
Are the
clocks at both ends in sync?
Is this
an exclusive muon neutrino? What about the e- and tau's? Is this
mass dependent?
Is this
effect only occurring in some sections of the beam\experiment?
It
occurs truly random, ie, in any section (space) or period (time) or
experiment\observation?
The
2007'Fermilab 'events' were also due to neutrinos?
-
And
finally, can this be … a trivial (or not so) 'relativistic'
effect? This could either be something not so funny (some sort of
grav time dilation or else) or extra dimensions, right there!
Funnier and more exciting: cf. Kostelecky
words in the Guardian.
Report:
Geneva,
23 September 2011. The OPERA1 experiment, which observes a neutrino
beam
from
CERN 730 km away at Italy’s INFN Gran Sasso Laboratory, will
present new results
in
a seminar at CERN this afternoon at 16:00 CEST. The seminar will be
webcast at http://
webcast.cern.ch.
Journalists wishing to ask questions may do so via twitter to @CERN,
or via
the
usual CERN press office channels.
The
OPERA result is based on the observation of over 15000 neutrino
events measured
at
Gran Sasso, and appears to indicate that the neutrinos travel at a
velocity 20 parts per
million
above the speed of light, nature’s cosmic speed limit. Given the
potential far-reaching
consequences
of such a result, independent measurements are needed before the
effect can
either
be refuted or firmly established. This is why the OPERA collaboration
has decided
to
open the result to broader scrutiny. The collaboration’s result is
available on the preprint
server
arxiv.org (LINK).
“This
result comes as a complete surprise,” said OPERA spokesperson,
Antonio Ereditato
of
the University of Bern. “After many months of studies and cross
checks we have not
found
any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the
measurement. While
OPERA
researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward
to independent
measurements
to fully assess the nature of this observation.”
“When
an experiment finds an apparently unbelievable result and can find no
artefact of the
measurement
to account for it, it’s normal procedure to invite broader
scrutiny, and this is
exactly
what the OPERA collaboration is doing, it’s good scientific
practice,” said CERN
Research
Director Sergio Bertolucci. “If this measurement is confirmed, it
might change our
view
of physics, but we need to be sure that there are no other, more
mundane, explanations.
That
will require independent measurements.”
In
order to perform this study, the OPERA Collaboration teamed up with
experts in metrology
from
CERN and other institutions to perform a series of high precision
measurements of the
distance
between the source and the detector, and of the neutrinos’ time of
flight. The distance
between
the origin of the neutrino beam and OPERA was measured with an
uncertainty of
20
cm over the 730 km travel path. The neutrinos’ time of flight was
determined with an
accuracy
of less than 10 nanoseconds by using sophisticated instruments
including advanced
GPS
systems and atomic clocks. The time response of all elements of the
CNGS beam line
and
of the OPERA detector has also been measured with great precision.
"We
have established synchronization between CERN and Gran Sasso that
gives us
1
OPERA has been designed and is being conducted by a team of
researchers from Belgium, Croatia, France, Germany,
Israel,
Italy, Japan, Korea, Russia, Switzerland and Turkey. The experiment
constitutes a complex scientific enterprise that
has
been realised thanks to the skill of a large number of scientists,
engineers, technicians and students, and with the strong
commitment
of the various actors of the project. In particular we mention the
LNGS/INFN and CERN laboratories, and the
major
financial support of Italy and Japan with substantial contributions
from Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland.
The
OPERA Collaboration presently includes about 160 researchers from 30
institutions and 11 countries:
IIHE-ULB
Brussels, Belgium; IRB Zagreb, Croatia; LAPP Annecy, France; IPNL
Lyon, France; IPHC Strasbourg, France;
Hamburg,
Germany; Technion Haifa, Israel; Bari, Italy; Bologna, Italy; LNF,
Italy, L’Aquila, Italy; LNGS, Italy; Naples,
Italy;
Padova, Italy; Rome, Italy; Salerno, Italy; Aichi, Japan; Toho,
Japan; Kobe, Japan; Nagoya, Japan; Utsunomiya, Japan;
GNU
Jinju, Korea; INR RAS Moscow, Russia; LPI RAS Moscow, Russia; ITEP
Moscow, Russia; SINP MSU Moscow,
Russia;
JINR Dubna, Russia; Bern, Switzerland; ETH Zurich, Switzerland; METU
Ankara, Turkey.
nanosecond
accuracy, and we’ve measured the distance between the two sites to
20
centimetres,”
said Dario Autiero, the CNRS researcher who will give this
afternoon’s
seminar.
“Although our measurements have low systematic uncertainty and high
statistical
accuracy,
and we place great confidence in our results, we’re looking forward
to comparing
them
with those from other experiments."
“The
potential impact on science is too large to draw immediate
conclusions or attempt
physics
interpretations. My first reaction is that the neutrino is still
surprising us with its
mysteries.”
said Ereditato. “Today’s seminar is intended to invite scrutiny
from the broader
particle
physics community.”
The
OPERA experiment was inaugurated in 2006, with the main goal of
studying the rare
transformation
(oscillation) of muon neutrinos into tau neutrinos. One first such
event was
observed
in 2010, proving the unique ability of the experiment in the
detection of the elusive
signal
of tau neutrinos.
Further
information:
Link
to OPERA statement
Link
to OPERA website
Link
to blog post
Link
to video
Press
office contact details
The Honourable Schoolboy
