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The timing equipment was calibrated by the Swiss Metrology Institute and independently verified by the German Metrology Institute PTB (Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt). 60 billionth of a second) faster than light travelling over the same distance, even though neutrinos are expected to travel slightly below the speed of light.īoth CERN and OPERA upgraded their equipment to use the most sophisticated timing devices and the same GPS satellite to synchronize their atomic clocks to within one nanosecond. ![]() Obviously, getting the timing right was essential, hence their careful checks on the arrival time of the muon neutrinos in Gran Sasso.Īnd there, surprise! The neutrinos reached the Gran Sasso laboratory 60 nanoseconds (i.e. To do so, they need to correlate the appearance of tau neutrinos in their detector with the arrival of muon neutrinos sent from CERN. This is something that had never been observed directly before but OPERA spotted one such event last year. OPERA was built mostly to detect the appearance of tau neutrinos from a beam of muon neutrinos, a phenomenon called “oscillation” that enables one type of neutrinos to mutate into a completely different type when travelling over a large distance. THE THING ABOUT BEING FASTER THAN LIGHT ZIPThat’s what so great and so hard with neutrinos: they can zip through matter nearly unaffected, making them also terribly difficult to detect. Neutrinos produced at CERN travel through the Earth’s crust to reach the OPERA detector. ![]() The OPERA experiment is located in an underground laboratory under the Gran Sasso mountain in central Italy 730 km away from CERN. I got it again when I heard about this measurement earlier this week. Not only that, but they would lose mass (that is energy) as their speed increased! I remember the shiver I got then. They were supposed to have a speed at rest not of zero, but equal to the speed of light. I remember being a teenager and hearing about tachyons, these hypothetical particles that could travel faster than the speed of light. Hard to get any wilder than this! The whole question now is to determine if this is really the case. This could be the most earth-shattering discovery we’ve had in decades. The news of the possible spotting of particles travelling faster than the speed of light is just as exciting as it is unexpected. And rumors have certainly been going fast and wild at CERN this past week. The constant threat of defeat adds importance and tension to every action.This is what one of my professors told us way back then at the end of a very serious lecture on relativity.
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