Moving somewhat slower than the speed of light, the team of researchers who last month shocked the scientific world with a claim that they had observed neutrinos traveling faster than that well-established cosmic speed barrier are now in the process of repeating their experiment in the face of skepticism about their methods.
In September, an international team of scientists led by Dr. Sergio Bertolucci reported that particles they had been firing for several years from the CERN particle accelerator in Switzerland at detectors at the OPERA facility in Gran Sasso, Italy placed about 450 miles away appeared to be arriving at their destination a fraction of a second earlier than the time it would take light to get there.
The particles, traveling through air, water, and rock, shouldn't have hit the Gran Sasso detectors any sooner than about 2.4 thousandths of a second after being fired, which is the time it would take light to travel the distance between the two points. Yet the CERN researchers reported that their neutrinos were getting to the target 64 nanoseconds fastermeaning that they were traveling faster than light, supposedly impossible according to Albert Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity.
That news sent the scientific community into an uproar, spawned breathless headlines questioning whether E still equaled MC squared, and gave new hope to anyone who has dreamt of faster-than-light travel to distant stars and planets.
The report also kick-started a movement to show that the results were somehow flawedin short, science started doing what it's supposed to do when surprising and potentially groundbreaking results are published.
Among the possible flaws in the OPERA team's experiment pointed out by other scientists was the absence of energy loss by the neutrinos, which a pair of Boston University physicists argued would be detectable if the particles had traveled faster than light. Other scientists questioned whether the team had correctly accounted for the effects of relativity on the GPS satellites they used to measure the amount of time it took for the neutrinos to travel from point A to point B in their experiment.
Now Bertolucci and his team are in the process of re-running the experiment to see if the original results hold up, according to several news reports.
"In the last few days we have started to send a different time structure of the beam to Gran Sasso, Bertolucci said in an interview with the BBC. "This will allow Opera to repeat the measurement, removing some of the possible systematics."
Antonio Ereditato, the co-ordinator of the OPERA experiment, elaborated in a meeting at CERN that was held to discuss the results of the original experiment:
"Despite the large significance of this measurement that you have seen and the stability of the analysis, since it has a potentially great impact on physics, this motivates the continuation of our studies in order to find still-unknown systematic effects."
Ereditato also gave a thumbnail sketch of what the original experiment entailed and what the team planned to do going forward in a video interview with the Associated Press: