It was found that neutrinos can travel faster than the speed of light.

Neutrino detector. Photo: AB McDonald (Queen's University) et al., The Sudbury Neutrino Observatory Institute

The work accepted by the journal Astroparticle Physics , which was conducted by Robert Elrich, a professor who had previously worked at George Mason University and now retired, states that evidence was found that the neutrino is essentially a tachyon — that is, a particle moving faster than light. Such statements have already happened - in 2011, a group of scientists received the result of measuring the speed of neutrinos, which surpassed the light , but then it turned out that the error in the measurements was to blame (literally some cable failed ).

But this time the professor suggests measuring not the neutrino velocity, but its mass. Tachyons should have a so-called. imaginary mass — that is, the square of their mass is negative. In this regard, for example, they are accelerated when energy is lost. So, Elrich claims that the following formula is true for the neutrino mass:

m ² _νe = −0.11 ± 0.016eV ²
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according to the results of several independent experiments, including the study of cosmic rays.

The concept of tachyons was first proposed in 1962 as evidence of a flaw in the theory of relativity. Einstein showed that particles can not reach the speed of light, because for this they would need to give infinite energy. However, if the particle as a result of the reaction immediately has a superluminal speed, then this does not contradict TO.

The fact that a neutrino can be a tachyon was assumed in 1985 by Khodos, Hauser and Kosteletsky. Their proposal was due to the fact that the beta decay of protons can occur if neutrinos are tachyons - in fact, particles traveling back in time. It was this assumption that prompted Elrich to investigate neutrinos in 1999, where he found confirmation of this assumption in several studies of cosmic rays.

Additional confirmation of the hypothesis can be obtained from the data, which in 2015 will begin to receive an experiment known as KATRIN . The experiment will study the spectrum of beta decay of tritium.