The OPERA experiment that caused such a flurry of interest with its reports of faster-than-light neutrinos has been repeated to take into account one of the criticisms and they find that the neutrinos still seem to be traveling faster than the speed of light. You can read the paper on the revised experiment here. (For previous posts in this topic, see sere.)
In the earlier experiments, the neutrinos were sent in clusters that spanned 10 microseconds, much longer than the 60 nanoseconds time difference that signaled the faster-than-light effect, and thus the experimenters had to do some fancy statistical analyses to extract the time of flight of each neutrino. Some skeptics had suggested that those statistical analyses were flawed. The new experiment has clusters that last only 3 nanoseconds, thus ruling out that particular source of systematic error.
The other potential sources of error will take longer to check out.
Leave a Reply