Here’s another major strike against the OPERA experiment’s claim of superluminal neutrinos, in addition to the Cohen-Glashow argument I described last week. It comes from a very natural place: the weak nuclear force. The theory (i.e. the equations) that we use, with great success, to predict the behavior of the weak nuclear force inextricably links some of the properties of neutrinos and charged leptons (electrons, muons and taus.) Because of this linkage, you simply can’t make neutrinos travel faster than light without making electrons do it too — by a smaller amount, to be sure, but still bigger than a part in a billion. And it turns out the effect is large enough that it should already have been detected by existing experiments, putting OPERA’s result further in doubt.
ICARUS weighs in; but we knew this
Another experiment has weighed in on superluminal neutrinos — indirectly. The ICARUS experiment has measured the energy spectrum of neutrinos traveling from CERN to Gran Sasso. They confirm that the Cohen-Glashow effect, which I described in some detail here, is not occurring in the beam of neutrinos that OPERA is also using. The distribution of … Read more