1/6/2024 0 Comments Neutrinos faster than light![]() “We have an absolute contradiction right there,” Nussinov says. Experiments like the IceCube neutrino telescope at the South Pole have seen high-energy neutrinos – and billions of muons to boot. In that case, we should not see any high-energy muons or neutrinos at all.īut we do. Curtailing the number of possible decay routes means the pions should decay less often, and the team calculates that they should slam into the Earth before they get a chance to decay. If neutrinos really can outstrip light as much as the OPERA measurement suggests, the atmospheric pions should decay completely into muons. Atmospheric pions are 100 to 1000 times more energetic than the pions produced at CERN, and their muon and neutrino progeny have correspondingly high energies. This can be seen in atmospheric pions, which are produced when cosmic rays slam into the atmosphere. This unequal energy inheritance is even more pronounced if the parent pion has more energy – the more energetic the pion is, the more energy it gives to the muon. The energy available to faster-than-light neutrinos from the CERN pions is too small by a factor of 10 to explain the speeds reported, the team say.Ĭould the neutrinos have started off slow, thereby getting a larger share of the inheritance, and then been accelerated somehow? Possibly, but Nussinov says this is unlikely because neutrinos usually do not interact with anything, making it hard to understand what could be doing the accelerating. “He bequeaths everything to the good son, and gives the other one literally nothing.” “It’s like a very rich father with a son who wants to go into business and continue by the rules, and a son who’s a black sheep,” Nussinov says. If the neutrinos did begin their lives moving faster than light, then their slower muon siblings should have gotten the lion’s share of their parents’ energy. That’s because the rules for inheriting energy treat slow-moving particles differently from those moving close to the speed of light. But if energy is conserved – that is, if the daughter muon and neutrino together have the same amount of energy as the pion they decayed from – the neutrinos could not have gone so fast, the team say. ![]() The neutrinos apparently outpaced light by 60 nanoseconds.
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