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Faster-than-light neutrinos? New answers flood in
Swifter than a speeding neutrino they were not, but explanations for the news that subatomic particles apparently travelled faster than light have still arrived remarkably fast.
"It is really impressive how many papers there are so quickly," says mathematician Peter Woit, author of the physics blog Not Even Wrong. "It is kind of standard procedure--when there's some new exciting experimental results, everyone wants to be the first to explain it. But this seems a bit even more so than usual."
On 23 September, physicists with the OPERA experiment in Italy said they had caught neutrinos arriving from the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland 60 nanoseconds sooner than light. That seemed to violate Einstein's theory of special relativity.
Virtual robbery
Since then, papers have gushed into the physics preprint website (arxiv.org) suggesting numerous ways to account for the extraordinary claim.
Some knock the result. Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and colleagues point out that faster-than-light neutrinos ought to produce shock waves, which in turn would produce "virtual" particles that should rob the neutrinos of energy (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6562). If they were ever faster than light, they wouldn't stay at that speed for long enough to account for OPERA's results.
Others potential flaws are more prosaic: some papers try to pinpoint hidden sources of error, like a mis-synchronisation of the clocks at either end of the neutrino beam (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6160).
Still others explore ways in which the OPERA results line up, or conflict with earlier limits on neutrinos' flight speeds, from supernova SN1987a, for example (arxiv.org/abs/1109.5682, arxiv.org/abs/1109.5917) and other detectors.
Monkeys on a typewriter
But the majority of papers hunt for ways that would allow the result to be right. As well as several proposing shortcuts through extra dimensions (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6354 and arxiv.org/abs/1109.6282) – a suggestion that was also mooted shortly after the neutrino announcement - explanations include neutrinos that move faster through the Earth than through space (arxiv.org/abs/1109.664), the notion that neutrinos might slice through dark matter while photons of light are slowed by the interaction (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6520), and the idea that a neutrino's speed depends on its direction and the time of day (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6296).
"At present, it would be foolhardy to say one [theory] looks better than the other," says CERN theorist John Ellis. "And they're probably all wrong, because the result will probably evaporate."
The number of explanations is useful, though. "Scientific conviction comes primarily from experimental results, but it's also the job of us theorists to, if you like, bash out all the possibilities, like monkeys on a typewriter," he says.
Read more: http://goo.gl/p5154
Swifter than a speeding neutrino they were not, but explanations for the news that subatomic particles apparently travelled faster than light have still arrived remarkably fast.
"It is really impressive how many papers there are so quickly," says mathematician Peter Woit, author of the physics blog Not Even Wrong. "It is kind of standard procedure--when there's some new exciting experimental results, everyone wants to be the first to explain it. But this seems a bit even more so than usual."
On 23 September, physicists with the OPERA experiment in Italy said they had caught neutrinos arriving from the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland 60 nanoseconds sooner than light. That seemed to violate Einstein's theory of special relativity.
Virtual robbery
Since then, papers have gushed into the physics preprint website (arxiv.org) suggesting numerous ways to account for the extraordinary claim.
Some knock the result. Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and colleagues point out that faster-than-light neutrinos ought to produce shock waves, which in turn would produce "virtual" particles that should rob the neutrinos of energy (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6562). If they were ever faster than light, they wouldn't stay at that speed for long enough to account for OPERA's results.
Others potential flaws are more prosaic: some papers try to pinpoint hidden sources of error, like a mis-synchronisation of the clocks at either end of the neutrino beam (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6160).
Still others explore ways in which the OPERA results line up, or conflict with earlier limits on neutrinos' flight speeds, from supernova SN1987a, for example (arxiv.org/abs/1109.5682, arxiv.org/abs/1109.5917) and other detectors.
Monkeys on a typewriter
But the majority of papers hunt for ways that would allow the result to be right. As well as several proposing shortcuts through extra dimensions (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6354 and arxiv.org/abs/1109.6282) – a suggestion that was also mooted shortly after the neutrino announcement - explanations include neutrinos that move faster through the Earth than through space (arxiv.org/abs/1109.664), the notion that neutrinos might slice through dark matter while photons of light are slowed by the interaction (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6520), and the idea that a neutrino's speed depends on its direction and the time of day (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6296).
"At present, it would be foolhardy to say one [theory] looks better than the other," says CERN theorist John Ellis. "And they're probably all wrong, because the result will probably evaporate."
The number of explanations is useful, though. "Scientific conviction comes primarily from experimental results, but it's also the job of us theorists to, if you like, bash out all the possibilities, like monkeys on a typewriter," he says.
Read more: http://goo.gl/p5154
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