Neutrinos travel at superlight speeds.

Continuing the post FRIDAY13 about experiments of scientists from the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN), showing that neutrinos are moving faster than the speed of light - translation of an interview that CERN press officer James Gilly gave to Radio Liberty / Radio Free Europe correspondent Ron Sinowitz ( Ron Synovitz). See the original here . The picture is from the BBC website .

Radio Liberty (RS): You said that even scientists from CERN who participated in the experiment can hardly believe the results of their observations. Why?

Jilly: Such things often happen in science. The experiment shows something unusual and the first thing you say: "I do not believe in it." Then you try to find an explanation in the imperfection of your equipment, your analysis, the methods used, etc. As a rule, in the end, you find a quite prosaic explanation that nullifies these results. But sometimes you can not find such an explanation. That is exactly what happened now. Scientists have made every effort to find an explanation related to the imperfection of the equipment, and could not do it. The next step that has just been taken is to submit these results to the community of elementary particle physicists.
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RS: If this discovery is confirmed, and other scientists will independently certify that neutrinos do move at a speed exceeding the speed of light, what effect can this have on physics?

Gilly: The theory of relativity has stood the test of time for nearly a hundred years. And this does not mean that it was not checked. Scientists checked and re-checked, measured, conducted experiments and made observations for a long time, and so far nothing indicated that this speed limit could be surpassed. So the current experiment contradicts everything that has been done before. This does not mean that it is carried out incorrectly. But in the scientific community there is a very strong feeling that there must be some other explanation.

RS: Can you explain in scientific terms that why an experiment conducted by scientists from CERN means a revolution in physics?

Gilly: Modern physics is based on two theories that emerged at the beginning of the 20th century - the theory of relativity and quantum mechanics. Relativity includes the theory of gravity. There is no quantum theory of gravity.

An attempt to combine these two theories is one of the most important, perhaps the most important goal of modern physics. Finding facts like the current one can help. But above all, we must make sure that these results are true.

RS: Can you tell us more about how to conduct experiments at CERN?

Gilly: Einstein's General Theory of Relativity states that there is a speed limit in the universe equal to the speed of light. Nothing can move faster. In this experiment, the time was measured during which the neutrino beam covered a distance of 732 kilometers underground between CERN and the underground particle trap located at Gran Sasso in Italy. Light travels this distance in about 2.4 milliseconds. The measurement results show that neutrinos arrive earlier than this time. A little bit earlier - 20 ppm of this time, but nevertheless - earlier.

If this is true, then this is a truly stunningly revolutionary result for physics. That is why we must be extremely careful before vigorously rejoicing and declaring that Einstein was wrong. We are trying to understand this result and wait for the results of independent measurements, before we can draw any definite conclusions about the meaning of the obtained facts.

RS: You mentioned the underground detectors used in the experiment. Does a neutrino beam pass through some kind of tunnel or other underground infrastructure, which allows it to behave like a ray of light?

Jilly: It's not a ray of light. These are elementary particles called neutrinos. Neutrinos are tiny particles that are very important for explaining the behavior of the universe, because they are omnipresent. They are present everywhere, flooding the universe. Neutrinos are very small and very difficult to detect, because they interact very weakly with other elementary particles. We are constantly bathed in a stream of neutrinos from space, a significant number of which are generated by the sun, and most of these neutrinos pass directly through the earth without any interaction.

We try to understand the nature of these particles, for this purpose such experiments are intended. Since neutrinos pass through the earth without any interaction, laboratories like Fermilab and CERN, it is quite simple to generate neutrino beams and send them to the ground. What we are doing. They pass through the earth and appear on the detector, in this case, located at a distance of 732 kilometers. No tunnels are there. Neutrinos literally pass through the earth.

RS: In 2007, similar results with neutrinos moving faster than the speed of light were obtained by researchers at the Fermilab laboratory in Chicago. What makes your study different?

Jilly: Those results are also very interesting. Fermilab conducted a similar experiment. They sent a beam of neutrinos to the north in the direction of an underground catcher located approximately at the same distance. They did the same thing - measured the time and found that neutrinos come a little earlier than the expected time. But the accuracy of their experiment was not as high as in the CERN experiment, so they could not make any confident statements. Now they are trying to upgrade their equipment so that it can make more accurate measurements. And we look forward to it with impatience.

RS: What do you think, how long does it take for independent research to confirm or deny that neutrinos travel at a speed that exceeds the speed of light?

Jilly: I think it will take months and maybe even years. We send a huge amount of neutrinos through the earth, but since they interact weakly, you have to wait a long time. Only when you send a lot of them will you be able to detect a certain number of interactions. In our experiments, we collected data for three years. So before we see an independent refutation or confirmation of our result, it will take quite a long time.