The speed of light has been measured to an exceptional degree and is not an issue with this OPERA result. The issue is how can we have measured a massive particle as traveling faster than light speed. This is a clear violation of Relativity.
We can so accurately measure the speed of light because we can generate a single photon in our generator and confidently detect that photon on the other end of the experiment. We cannot do that with neutrinos.
A neutrino is so small and light (almost, but not quite, massless) that it barely interacts with anything, ever. We cannot tell if we have generated a single neutrino and the confidence level is pretty high that at the other end we will most probably
not be able to detect it. So we have to run these types of experiments using massive numbers of neutrinos generated and detected in pulses of literally millions of particles.
The way CERN generates neutrinos is by slamming millions of high energy protons into millions of atoms generating millions of masons that decay into millions of neutrinos (OK, so they are actually anti-neutrinos but that is beyond the detail level I'm working in here). The point here is that these things are generated and detected in powerful short pulses comprised of millions of particles.
Nothing in this universe is perfect. The mas (energy) of a proton has been measured at 1.672621777(74)10
−27 kg (about .938 GeV). Note the (74) in this measurement. That is the error bar. Some protons may be slightly more massive, some less so, than the mean measurement. The neutrino mass is given as less than 3x10
-36 kg (about 2 eV). We cannot yet be certain how much less then 2 eV in mass the various flavors of neutrino are but we can be sure that, as with everything else, it will vary across some (very small) range.
The high energy protons generated by CERN (or anywhere) will be generated over a range of masses. The masses of the resultant pulse of protons will form a bell curve with very narrow arms and a steep high peak at the mean value. Most of the generated protons would have measured mass clustered very close to the mean with a few (100,000s?) of slightly greater and slightly lesser mass within the narrow arms around the mean value.
Similarly, the
timing of proton generation will vary. So we will have another bell curve where most of the protons in the pulse are generated around a specific mean time with a few (100,000s?) generated ever so slightly earlier and ever so slightly later.
Now to
speculate on the OPERA results. And, yes, admittedly, with the view that Relativity is preserved.
There are three (3) speculations that may be at work here.
1. There
may be a correlation between the (slightly) increased mass (energy) of a generated proton and a (slightly) increased mass (energy) of the neutrino generated by that specific proton collision.
2. There
may be a correlation between (slightly) higher proton mass and its (slightly) earlier release from the proton generator.
These two (2) speculations
could mean that higher energy protons would be at the leading edge of the proton pulse and thus higher energy neutrinos at the leading edge of the resulting neutrino pulse as they reach the OPERA detectors.
In 2006 MINOS/FermiLab saw a similar faster-then-'c' result, though, unlike OPERA, the MINOS error bars overlapped 'c' so the results were inconclusive.
Both the OPERA/CERN and the prior MINOS/FermiLab experiments used polystyrene scintillators as the active neutrino detectors.
3. There
may be a bias in polystyrene scintillators that detect (slightly) higher energy neutrinos only (and very few of those anyway).
Again, this is all speculation. But (big) if these speculations are correct then the MINOS and OPERA results can be accounted for within the restrictions of Relativity. Considering the CERN pulses were 10,000 nanoseconds long, a 60 nanosecond differential from generated time peak (mean value) at CERN to the expected detection peak (mean value) at OPERA, is well within the scope of these speculations.
Edited by AZPaul3, : correction
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