Other neutrino experiments plan to double-check the results. “Everybody’s bias in responding to this is going to be that this is some sort of systematic uncertainty that they didn’t figure out.” Still, Autiero and his colleagues may have missed some unknown systematic uncertainties built into their equipment, says Kevin McFarland, a particle physicist at the University of Rochester in New York and a spokesperson for Fermilab’s MINERvA neutrino experiment. Divide distance by time, and the particles must have been traveling 0.0025 percent faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. The neutrinos shaved about 60 nanoseconds off that time, according to atomic clocks at either end synchronized by a satellite.

Light traveling in a vacuum would have made this trip in 2.43 milliseconds. “We could have done an even better job if we stopped all the traffic,” says Dario Autiero, an OPERA team member and a physicist at the Institute of Nuclear Physics of Lyon in France. Thanks to GPS devices, the distance of this trip, about 730 kilometers, is known to within 20 centimeters - a feat of accuracy that required closing a lane of traffic for a week in a tunnel above the detector in Italy.

A detector spotted the arrival of a small fraction of the particles - about 16,000 in total between 20. They then traveled underground to Italy’s National Gran Sasso Laboratory beneath the Apennines Mountains. OPERA’s neutrinos were born from protons smashed into a chunk of graphite at CERN. But the uncertainties in those measurements were too large to justify calling it a discovery. In 2007 the MINOS experiment turned up hints of neutrinos traveling impossibly fast between the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., and a mine in Minnesota. Ask him to bet against the new results, though, and he says he’d be willing to bet his house.Īfter all, this isn’t the first report of improbably speedy neutrinos. “This will be a tremendous revolutionary finding if it is true,” says Chang Kee Jung, a particle physicist at Stony Brook University in New York and a spokesperson for the T2K neutrino experiment in Japan.

Neutrinos faster than light