Superluminal neutrinos -- first seen in America, to be tested at Fermilab?

[eppur_se_muova]

So long, and thanks for all the quarks {The Economist)

Oct 1st 2011 | batavia, illinois | from the print edition

ON SEPTEMBER 23rd researchers at CERN, Europe’s main particle-physics laboratory, caused a stir. They suggested that neutrinos—ethereal particles which pervade the universe but rarely interact with anything while they are doing so—can travel faster than light. According to Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, this is impossible.

Physicists from OPERA, one of the experiments at CERN, sent beams of neutrinos through the Earth’s crust from the organisation’s headquarters on the outskirts of Geneva to an underground laboratory 730km (450 miles) away beneath Gran Sasso, a mountain in the Apennines. The neutrinos appeared to be reaching the detector 60 nanoseconds faster than light would take to cover the same distance—a small deviation, and one that might be written off as experimental error if an experiment in America, called MINOS, had not detected a similar anomaly in 2007.

The MINOS result, too, was thought an error. Now researchers are not so sure. Most are unwilling to believe Einstein was wrong. A few, though, are contemplating the idea that OPERA’s neutrinos are interacting with the matter of the Earth’s crust in a way, hitherto unknown, that allows them to take a shortcut through one of the extra seven dimensions that are hypothesised, by some versions of theoretical physics, to exist alongside the familiar four of length, breadth, height and time. If that is true, it would take physics beyond the theory of relativity, just as Einstein took the subject beyond Newton’s laws of motion and gravity, and might allow physicists to merge relativistic ideas with those of quantum theory—a goal of the subject for almost a century.
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Discovering the Higgs is important, no question. It is, though, a bit old hat given that, as a theory, the Higgs mechanism goes back to the 1960s. Supraluminal neutrinos, if they really exist, are something completely new. And Fermilab is well placed to investigate them. It already whips up the world’s most intense beams of neutrinos, using kit that has nothing to do with the Tevatron. As luck would have it, a project called NOvA, which should start collecting data in the spring of 2013, will send neutrinos through the Earth’s crust from Batavia to an underground detector 810km away in Minnesota. If NOvA finds the same result as OPERA and MINOS, then the post-Einsteinian era of physics really will have begun, and Fermilab will be in the thick of it.

Indeed, NOvA is only the start. Pier Oddone, Fermilab’s boss, plans to follow it with the Long Baseline Neutrino Experiment (LBNE), which will send a yet-more intense beam of the particles to an underground laboratory in South Dakota. After that, the mysteriously named Project X will push the intensity of the neutrino beam still higher.
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more: http://www.economist.com/node/21530946?fsrc=rss|sct




Much of the rest of the article discusses the difficulty of funding these projects through Congress, which doesn't want to give money to international projects. Worth reading for good coverage of both the science and the politics.

[bananas]

1. It doesn't violate relativity.

I wish they would stop saying that.
Good article, thanks.