The European Organization for Nuclear
Research (CERN) has reconfirmed the revolutionary September results of its
historic experiment that detected neutrinos, a type of uncharged particle,
moving faster than the speed of light, according to an announcement from the
agency on Friday.
“One key test was to repeat the measurement
with very short beam pulses from CERN,” the agency noted in a press release on
its website. “This allowed the extraction time of the protons, that ultimately
lead to the neutrino beam, to be measured more precisely…The new measurements
do not change the initial conclusion.”
The initial experiment, carried out using
CERN’s OPERA instrument in Gran Sasso, Italy, involved firing longer beams of
neutrinos from CERN’s facility near Geneva, Switzerland, which each lasted 10
microseconds (10 millionths of a second) some 454 miles away to the facility in
Gran Sasso.
The new experiment altered this model by
firing 20 new, shorter pulses, each lasting 3 nanoseconds (3 billionths of a
second), separated by intervals of 524 nanoseconds, in an effort to overcome
the margin of error in the first experiment.
That experiment, the original one, detected
neutrinos traveling at a speed of 2.39994 milliseconds (0.00239994 seconds) 60
nanoseconds (60 billionths of a second, 0.00000006) faster than the speed of
light (2.4 milliseconds in this experiment, or 0.0024 seconds). This diagram
from the BBC helpfully illustrates the degree to which the particles moved
faster than the speed of light, an unimaginably small but significant amount.
