"If true, it is a true bomb to physics is a discovery as he comes all ages," says Thibault Damour, specialist of Einstein's relativity to the IHES (Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette). The reason for this excitement is simple: a team of researchers from the Institute of Nuclear Physics of Lyon showed that neutrinos "superluminal" very light particles, are able to travel faster than light. Phenomenon simply impossible according to the theory of relativity of Einstein, which defines the speed of light as an impassable limit for any object with a mass. If measures Autiero Dario and his colleagues at CNRS in Lyon are just, the whole of modern physics is reviewed. The consequences are so significant that all the experts are cautious and want to ask that the experience is replicated elsewhere, with another team, before throwing a blow to the trash all the work of Einstein on relativity.
Despite this, the French researchers' work appears very solid. He stood six months of audits by external colleagues called in to try to find a way, an error in the experiment. "It's so huge that we scared of having deceived somewhere, says Stavros Katsanevas, deputy director of the IN2P3 (National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics at CNRS). Since the first results in March, we made checks at the CNRS, and after at the Opera international experience, working on the neutrino detector. Nothing was found, and as information began to leak, it was decided to make it public now. "
Violation of the speed of light was observed on a beam of neutrinos, particles that interact almost no ultra-light with matter, produced by the accelerator at CERN, near Geneva, and detected under the mountain of Gran Sasso , in the Apennines in central Italy. It was expected that neutrinos pass through unhindered and 731 km of crust that separates the two science facilities at nearly the speed of light, a journey of at least 2.5 milliseconds. Neutrinos are elementary particles produced almost imperceptible in huge quantities by nuclear reactions, such as those that occur in nuclear power plants or in the heart of the Sun. Every second, 65 billion neutrinos emitted by our star through each square centimeter of the Earth's surface, and only 1 in 10,000 billion of these particles is intercepted by an atom of our planet.
The large detector buried under Mount Gran Sasso does not weigh less than 1500 tons. Photo credits: Photo CNRS / IPNL / ITY, Bernard.
But the great surprise of Autiero Dario and his colleagues from Lyon, neutrinos arriving on the detector Opera, in the laboratory of Gran Sasso, with an average of 60 nanoseconds (60 billionths of a second) earlier than in the light. A shift that seems small, but that no current theory is able to explain.
There was no such thing as race between photons (or particles of light) and neutrinos, but the researchers timed the path of the particle beams with high accuracy. Leaning back on the atomic clock of a GPS satellite visible at the same time on both sites, the clocks at CERN and Gran Sasso have been calibrated to an accuracy better than a billionth of a second. Altogether, and taking into account various effects of measuring instruments, the team believes that the measurement uncertainty is better, in the order of ten nanoseconds or less than 60 nanoseconds measures. The work of physicists Lyon is robust enough to be widely published, which was made last night on the public server arXiv.
