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"Everything should be as simple as it is, but not simpler", Albert Einstein
Browsing All posts tagged under »neutrinos«
Neutrinos from outer space open new eye in the sky
Fancy seeing the sky in neutrino? Supermassive black holes and enormous stellar explosions may give up their secrets now thatneutrinos from space can be detected. The South Pole IceCube neutrino observatory has seen a handful of ghostly high-energy neutrinos that almost certainly came from outer space, opening up the skies for neutrino astronomy. “We are witnessing the birth […]
Neutrinos, the standard model misfits
February 12, 2013
For years, scientists thought that neutrinos fit perfectly into the standard model. But they don’t. By better understanding these strange, elusive particles, scientists seek to better understand the workings of all the universe, one discovery at a time. by Joseph Piergrossi Neutrinos are as mysterious as they are ubiquitous. One of the most abundant particles […]
Scientists place new limits on sterile neutrinos
August 21, 2012
Two Fermilab experiments have put new boundaries on a search for a possibly undiscovered type of neutrino, leaving prior measurements unexplained. So far, scientists have observed three types, or flavors, of neutrino: the electron neutrino, the muon neutrino and the tau neutrino. But physicists have seen hints that this may not be the whole picture. […]
ICARUS: Neutrinos Travel At Light Speed. Period.
August 14, 2012
By Tommaso Dorigo Little less than one year ago the world of fundamental physics was shaken by the bold claim of the OPERA collaboration, which produced a measurement of the time of flight of neutrinos traveling underground from Geneva to the Gran Sasso mine in central Italy. The beam of neutrinos, produced by the CERN SpS […]
MAJORANA, the search for the most elusive neutrino of all
May 17, 2012
In a cavern almost a mile underground in the Black Hills, an experiment called the MAJORANA DEMONSTRATOR, 40 kilograms of pure germanium crystals enclosed in deep-freeze cryostat modules, will soon set out to answer one of the most persistent and momentous questions in physics: are neutrinos their own antiparticles? If the answer is yes, it […]
Scientists send encoded message through rock via neutrino beam
March 14, 2012
Humankind is constantly inventing new ways to stay in touch. But in some situations it’s difficult to keep the lines of communication open. A space shuttle’s radio falls silent when the craft slips behind a neighboring planet. A submarine loses contact when deep water blocks signals from the surface. Scientists recently proved possible a new […]
Other Neutrino Anomalies
February 27, 2012
Many a time I have stressed on this blog that neutrinos are boring, though I should specify that they are boring from the point of view of a theoretical physicist. For experimentalists, on the other hand, neutrinos are first of all annoying. Indeed, taking part in a neutrino experiment seems the shortest path to trouble, […]
Error Undoes Faster-Than-Light Neutrino Results
February 22, 2012
by Edwin Cartlidge It appears that the faster-than-light neutrino results, announced last September by the OPERA collaboration in Italy, was due to a mistake after all. A bad connection between a GPS unit and a computer may be to blame. Physicists had detected neutrinos travelling from the CERN laboratory in Geneva to the Gran Sasso […]
Are OPERA neutrinos faster than light because of non-inertial reference frames?
January 22, 2012
Claudio Germana ABSTRACT Recent results from the OPERA experiment reported a neutrino beam traveling faster than light. The experiment measured the neutrino time of flight (TOF) over a baseline from the CERN to the Gran Sasso site. The neutrino beam arrives 60 ns earlier than a light ray would do. Because the result has an […]
Building a Massive Neutrino Hunter Beneath the Mediterranean
December 14, 2011
The second-biggest structure in human history will seek to answer deep cosmic mysteries Neutrinos may or may not move faster than light, but regardless, they’re special little things. They speed through the planet, and through you, and through everything; but, chargeless and puny, they interact with their surroundings so minimally that other particles hardly take […]
Neutrinos and multiverses: a new cosmology beckons
November 28, 2011
You wait decades for discoveries that could revolutionise physics, then three come along at once “THE universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose,” as geneticist J. B. S. Haldane once remarked. In recent decades, physicists have done their best to prove Haldane wrong, by supposing some very queer […]
Neutrinos still faster than light in latest version of experiment
November 18, 2011
OPERA experiment reports anomaly in flight time of neutrinos from CERN to Gran Sasso UPDATE 18 November 2011 Following the OPERA collaboration’s presentation at CERN on 23 September, inviting scrutiny of their neutrino time-of-flight measurement from the broader particle physics community, the collaboration has rechecked many aspects of its analysis and taken into account valuable […]
Olber’s Paradox for Superluminal Neutrinos
November 15, 2011
Constraining ExtremeNeutrino Speeds at TeV-ZeV Energies with the Diffuse Neutrino Background Brian C. Lacki The only invariant speed in special relativity is c; therefore, if some neutrinos travel at even tiny speeds above c, normal special relativity is incomplete and any superluminal speed may be possible. I derive a limit on superluminal neutrino speeds v […]
Testing the Special Relativity Theory with Neutrino interactions
November 4, 2011
P.W. Cattaneo Abstract A recent report of superluminal neutrinos from the OPERA experiment appears in contradiction with prediction of energy loss of superluminal neutrino via the pair creation process ν → νe+e−. The same process should result in isolated e+e− pairs in detectors with good tracking capability traversed by a large flux of high energy neutrino like NOMAD. […]
Double Beta Decay
October 30, 2011
Steven R. Elliott At least one neutrino has a mass of about 50 meV or larger. However, the absolute mass scale for the neutrino remains unknown. Furthermore, the critical question: Is the neutrino its own antiparticle? is unanswered. Studies of double beta decay offer hope for determining the absolute mass scale. In particular, zero-neutrino double […]
Faster-than-light neutrino experiment to be run again
October 28, 2011
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 […]
Measuring elusive neutrinos flowing through the Earth, physicists learn more about the sun
October 7, 2011
Using one of the most sensitive neutrino detectors on the planet, an international team including physicists Laura Cadonati and Andrea Pocar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst are now measuring the flow of solar neutrinos reaching earth more precisely than ever before. The detector probes matter at the most fundamental level and provides a powerful […]
New theories emerge to disprove OPERA faster-than-light neutrinos claim
October 6, 2011
– It’s been just two weeks since the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) team released its announcement claiming that they have been measuring muon neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light, causing an uproar in the physics community. Since that time, many papers (perhaps as many as 30 to the preprint server arXiv […]
A selection of papers discussing the recently discovered faster-than-light neutrino effect
October 1, 2011
New Constraints On Neutrino Velocities Superluminal Neutrinos Without Revolution On the Possibility of Superluminal Neutrino Propagation The Hypothesis of Superluminal Neutrinos: comparing OPERA with other Data Relativistic Superluminal Neutrinos The OPERA Neutrino Velocity Result And The Synchronisation Of Clocks A Possible Statistical Mechanism Of Anomalous Neutrino Velocity In OPERA Experiment? A Comment On The OPERA […]
Fermilab stops hunting Higgs, starts neutrino quest
September 28, 2011
ROGER DIXON gestures, bringing his hand alarmingly close to the big red button that has the power to shut down one of the world’s most powerful particle accelerators forever. “It’s already hooked up,” he says, in response to my nervous questions. We are standing in a room full of blinking displays and control panels at […]
Live Chat: Have Neutrinos Broken the Speed Limit of Light?
September 28, 2011
Nothing can go faster than light, right? Einstein said so. But last week a group of researchers in Italy announced that they’d measured the speed of thousands of neutrinos (tiny, almost massless particles that were fired at their detector from the CERN particle physics lab 730 kilometers away) and found they were traveling slightly faster […]
Saving both super-luminal and SN1987A neutrinos?
September 27, 2011
Inconsistence of super-luminal Opera neutrino speed with SN1987A neutrinos burst and with flavor neutrino mixing Recent news from Cern Opera experiment seem to hint for a muon neutrino faster than light, maybe tachyon in nature. If all neutrino are just tachyon their arrival (at 17 MeV) will be even much faster than 17 GeV Opera […]
Apparent Lorentz violation with superluminal Majorana neutrinos at OPERA?
September 27, 2011
F. Tamburini , Μ. Laveder From the data release of OPERA – CNGS experiment, and publicly announced on 23 Septem- ber 2011, we cast a phenomenological toy model based on a Majorana neutrino state carrying an imaginary mass term, already discussed by Majorana in 1932. This imaginary term can be a fictious term induced by […]
Superluminal neutrinos from String Theory
September 25, 2011
1. Crete Center for Theoretical Physics A remarkable claim has been made by the OPERA experiment, that takes a neutrino beam from CERN and studies its interactions inside the Gran Sasso laboratory in central Italy. As described in their paper http://fr.arxiv.org/abs/1109.4897 submitted to the ArXiV, they have measured the velocity of the neutrinos and found […]
Potential mistakes in the Opera research
September 24, 2011
Almost all theoretical oriented physicists including myself seem to feel almost certain that there is a mistake in the Opera paper and the claimed violation of the relativistic speed limit will go away. On the other hand, I think that many people who like technology etc. were impressed by the precision work that the Opera […]
The Phantom of OPERA
September 24, 2011
Those working in science are accustomed to receiving emails starting with “dear sir/madam, please look at the attached file where I’m proving einstein theory wrong”. This time it’s a tad more serious because the message comes from a genuine scientific collaboration… As everyone knows by now, the OPERA collaboration announced that muon neutrinos produced at […]
Some Comments on the Faster Than Light Neutrinos
September 23, 2011
Matt Strassler The OPERA experiment has now presented its results, suggesting that a high-energy neutrino beam has traveled 730 kilometers at a speed just a bit faster than the speed of light. It is clear the experiment was done very carefully. Many cross-checks were performed. No questions were asked for which the speaker did not […]
Conclusions from OPERA experiment
September 23, 2011
EP Seminar “New results from OPERA on neutrino properties“ by Dario Autiero (Institut de Physique Nucleaire de Lyon) Friday, September 23, 2011 from 16:00 to 18:00 (Europe/Zurich)
Dimension-hop may allow neutrinos to cheat light speed
September 23, 2011
A CERN experiment claims to have caught neutrinos breaking the universe’s most fundamental speed limit. The ghostly subatomic particles seem to have zipped faster than light from the particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland, to a detector in Italy. Fish that physics textbook back out of the wastebasket, though: the new result contradicts previous measurements […]
Neutrinos Travel Faster Than Light, According to One Experiment
September 22, 2011
Read also: A Six-Sigma Signal Of Superluminal Neutrinos From Opera! If it’s true, it will mark the biggest discovery in physics in the past half-century: Elusive, nearly massless subatomic particles called neutrinos appear to travel just faster than light, a team of physicists in Europe reports. If so, the observation would wreck Einstein’s theory of […]
Supernovas and Neutrinos
September 20, 2011
Matt Strassler Supernovas are some of nature’s most common and powerful nuclear bombs. They are also among the most useful for particle physicists and astrophysicists alike. In “core-collapse” supernovas, a huge number of protons are converted, by the absorption of electrons, into neutrons, with the consequent emission of neutrinos. [Powering this process is one of […]
A Six-Sigma Signal Of Superluminal Neutrinos From Opera!
September 19, 2011
By Tommaso Dorigo The news is all in the title. A unconfirmed rumor from the Opera experiment (see picture below), the neutrino underground detector in the Gran Sasso cavern in central Italy, tells that a measurement has been performed on the time that muon neutrinos take to travel from their production point at CERN to […]
Supernovae, Neutrinos, and the Chirality of the Amino Acids
June 25, 2011
Abstract: A mechanism for creating an enantioenrichment in the amino acids, the building blocks of the proteins, that involves global selection of one handedness by interactions between the amino acids and neutrinos from core-collapse supernovae is described. The chiral selection involves the dependence of the interaction cross sections on the orientations of the spins of […]
A step closer to solving one of the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics?
June 15, 2011
Where did all the matter in the universe come from? This is one of the biggest mysteries in fundamental physics and exciting results released on 15 June 2011 from the international T2K neutrino experiment in Japan could be an important step towards resolving this puzzle. The intriguing results indicate a new property of the enigmatic particles known […]
May 15, 2013
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