The team of the Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus (OPERA) in Italy continuously monitors the presence of neutrinos that are emitted by another experiment carried out at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) located in Switzerland, 730 kilometers away.
Neutrinos (electrically subatomic particles that are neutral) are quite at a loss for mundane things, like Earth, and move through with barely any interest (their cross-section and their probability of interaction are very low). Due to their small size and their small size, they can move at the same speed as light, that is, c (see the video to the left). The speed at which that light travels in a vacuum is known as 299,792,458 meters per second.
Utilizing the GPS timer and location data using GPS timing and position data, the OPERA team claims to have figured out how far between the moment when neutrinos begin to emit by LHC LHC and the time where they are detected in Italy with a accuracy that lets them estimate the time that neutrinos will arrive within ten nanoseconds (a nanosecond is one billionth of one second).
The thing they claim to have discovered, however, is that neutrinos are arriving 60 nanoseconds (0.00000006 seconds) earlier. If they are correct, this will be an eight standard deviation result, enough to convince scientists that something is actually wrong.
The researchers involved have shared their results with the scientists in the hope that, should something have been missed, the issue will be recognized by their colleagues. The peer-review process is generally very effective in removing likely sources of error, but in this instance, there are a lot of possibilities. However, on the surface this, it appears that like the OPERA group has been extremely cautious.
There’s a problem with knowing the precise positions of the detector and source within the specified uncertainty, taking into consideration that during the additional 60 nanoseconds that neutrinos supposedly travel, they’ll cover a total of 18 meters. That means that we need to know those two locations – as well as that of the Geodesic distance that lies between them – within three meters of 730,000 meters.
AFP
The traditional civilian-grade GPS is accurate to approximately 15 meters. More sophisticated techniques are used for precise surveying, including the differential GPS (10-centimeter preciseness). The more accurate range there is ” carrier phase tracking,” which is able to outperform one-centimetre accuracy.
This requires that the GPS antenna be elevated above the ground, however, so it is also necessary to consider the timing of signals that travel through wires to underground experiments.
The OPERA researchers made use of their more exact GPS as well as the Cesium-based atomic clock to ensure that their timings and positions were as precise as they could be.
If all potential sources of error have been identified, what does this be? Time travel is the most popular topic when particles with a speed greater than light are mentioned; however, don’t put too much into the possibility of a TARDIS in the near future.
If a particle can move more quickly than c, some odd things occur. It is able to break (special) the law of relativity, which says that there is an absolute speed limit – the speed that massless particles travel that isn’t dependent on relative motion.