London (Reuters) – new research suggests that neutrinos that seemed to violate a basic physical law to travel faster than the speed of light are, after all, within the universal speed limit.
The last measurement of time of flight of the subatomic particles made by the Research Centre CERN in Geneva, for the Italian Gran Sasso laboratory contradicted a first reading on ultrafast speed reported last September, which caused great excitement in the scientific sphere.
Since then, have increased the doubts about the original statements, especially after the news of the last month of the first conclusion of the so-called experiment OPERA could have been distorted by a defective cabling.
“Evidence is beginning to point toward which the result of OPERA is born of a measuring device”, said Friday the director of research at CERN, Sergio Bertolucci, in a statement.
The new analysis was performed by researchers working in an experiment separately called Icaro.
The team used time-independent data and measured seven neutrinos in the beam of light sent from CERN. All of them produced a consistent time with the speed of light, the Research Center said.
Many scientists had been sceptical about the original measurements, which missed the theory of special relativity by Albert Einstein in 1905, stating that nothing in the universe can travel faster than the speed of light, a statement on which much of modern physics and Cosmology is based on land.
The team of Icarus, who works in the same lab of the Gran Sasso, in the northeast of Rome, already had questioned the initial results, because neutrinos do not seem to lose energy in your flight as it would have happened if they had broken the barrier of light.
