{"id":5900,"date":"2011-11-18T10:31:29","date_gmt":"2011-11-18T10:31:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2011\/11\/18\/fast-neutrinos-still-fast\/"},"modified":"2011-11-18T10:31:29","modified_gmt":"2011-11-18T10:31:29","slug":"fast-neutrinos-still-fast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2011\/11\/18\/fast-neutrinos-still-fast\/","title":{"rendered":"Fast Neutrinos: Still Fast"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the more reasonable criticisms of the OPERA result showing neutrinos apparently moving faster than light<\/a> was that they were claiming 20-nanosecond resolution on the timing of a neutrino pulse that was 10000 nanoseconds long. They got their timing by doing fits to the shape of the whole pulse, as described in that link, and there’s always a little bit of alchemy in that sort of process, but they had big long pulses because that’s what the accelerator at CERN that served as the source of the neutrino beam provided.<\/p>\n

After the original annoucnement, they got the neutrino beam reconfigured to produce much, much shorter pulses– less than 10ns. And while they’ve only been running this way for a few weeks, they’ve already got 20 neutrino detections from the shorter pulses, and they see exactly the same timing anomaly. Tommaso Dorigo has more details<\/a>, with graphs.<\/p>\n

Now, this isn’t a solid proof of anything– it’s the same people using the same apparatus, so all it really shows is that their results are self-consistent. In other words, they’re not idiots<\/a> getting confused by curve-fitting anomalies. There’s still the possibility of some subtle systematic effect in the apparatus throwing everything off– indeed, that remains the most likely explanation. All this really does is require that the systematic-error explanation be a little more subtle than it was before.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of the more reasonable criticisms of the OPERA result showing neutrinos apparently moving faster than light was that they were claiming 20-nanosecond resolution on the timing of a neutrino pulse that was 10000 nanoseconds long. They got their timing by doing fits to the shape of the whole pulse, as described in that link,… Continue reading Fast Neutrinos: Still Fast<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19,33,7,141,11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5900","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-experiment","category-in_the_news","category-physics","category-relativity","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5900"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5900\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}