FTL Neutrinos?

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Tom Ligon
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FTL Neutrinos?

Post by Tom Ligon »

Just in on my favorite source of scientific information, Yahoo News.

Well, maybe not my favorite, but they do tend to break things fast, and frequently with more buzz than warranted, but this does sound intriguing. The belief that neutrinos change "flavor" is held up as proof that they do not travel at the speed of light (under which condition they would experience no time), and that they therefore have mass. But this suggests another possibility in which time could be felt by the particle:

"Antonio Ereditato, who works at the CERN particle physics center on the Franco-Swiss border, told Reuters that measurements over three years showed the neutrinos moving 60 nanoseconds quicker than light over a distance of 730 km between Geneva and Gran Sasso, Italy."

Particles recorded moving faster than light: CERN
By Robert Evans, editing by Tom Miles | Reuters

http://news.yahoo.com/particles-recorde ... 41657.html

Carl White
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Post by Carl White »


JoeP
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Post by JoeP »

This is interesting. So here is a simple experiment....

Lets say we are observing a distant star that is some large number of LY away that we know will go supernova soon. With the supernova, a burst of neutrinos is expected along with the burst of photons.

By the time we optically see the supernova, we should have already detected the burst of neutrinos. Over long course of travel, the difference in speed should really add up to a large difference in time.

Never heard of any astronomer mention this though.

Diogenes
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Post by Diogenes »

JoeP wrote:This is interesting. So here is a simple experiment....

Lets say we are observing a distant star that is some large number of LY away that we know will go supernova soon. With the supernova, a burst of neutrinos is expected along with the burst of photons.

By the time we optically see the supernova, we should have already detected the burst of neutrinos. Over long course of travel, the difference in speed should really add up to a large difference in time.

Never heard of any astronomer mention this though.

Device would have to be in Orbit so as to maintain a clear view. Also I don't think astronomers can predict supernovas. (even if they could, I bet it would be give or take a few thousand years. :) )

Might be possible to wait for a burst of neutrinos (they get there first right?) and then look around for a new supernova. I don't think it is necessarily an easy experiment. Neutrinos are hard to detect. I think they have a large array neutrino detector in Japan, and another in Antarctica. Maybe if they could keep the timing accurate enough between the detector arrays and the orbiting satellites they might be able to get the info from data they already collect. They might even have some that they could apply retroactively.
‘What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.’
— Lord Melbourne —

Tom Ligon
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Post by Tom Ligon »

The supernova 1987A is believed to have produced a small but significant number of neutrino counts seen at three neutrino counting facilities when it cooked off. I don't know how well they can compare the time of the supernova with the time of the counts. At the time, they were thought to be coincident, but that may have just been an assumption.

The supernova was noticed soon after it occurred, but I'm not sure it was witnessed.

The Swift satellite can detect supernovas that produce gamma ray bursts. It can localize them almost instantly. However, anything much further away than one of the Magellanic Clouds (where 1987A occurred) is gonna be a bear to detect by neutrinos. The neutrino detector would not have to be line of sight ... in fact it is likely to be buried deep in an old mine, and can see neutrinos thru the entire planet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Gamm ... st_Mission

Interesting links:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701081

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A
"Approximately three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached the Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at three separate neutrino observatories."
Last edited by Tom Ligon on Thu Sep 22, 2011 10:56 pm, edited 3 times in total.

EricF
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Re: FTL Neutrinos?

Post by EricF »

So if I understand this right, they determined that the neutrino took
0.002434958 seconds to cover the 730km, vs the 0.002435018 seconds light would take.

That's quite a slim margin of error; are the instruments for detecting neutrinos really that calibrated that this couldn't simply be the result of the timing of the clocks at the starting location being nanoseconds off from the ones in the receiving location?

JoeP
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Post by JoeP »

Tom Ligon wrote:The supernova 1987A is believed to have produced a small but significant number of neutrino counts seen at three neutrino counting facilities when it cooked off. I don't know how well they can compare the time of the supernova with the time of the counts. At the time, they were thought to be coincident, but that may have just been an assumption.

The supernova was noticed soon after it occurred, but I'm not sure it was witnessed.

The Swift satellite can detect supernovas that produce gamma ray bursts. It can localize them almost instantly. However, anything much further away than one of the Magellanic Clouds (where 1987A occurred) is gonna be a bear to detect by neutrinos. The neutrino detector would not have to be line of sight ... in fact it is likely to be buried deep in an old mine, and can see neutrinos thru the entire planet.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swift_Gamm ... st_Mission

Interesting links:

http://arxiv.org/abs/astro-ph/0701081

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A
"Approximately three hours before the visible light from SN 1987A reached the Earth, a burst of neutrinos was observed at three separate neutrino observatories."
Interesting. Not sure how far off SN 1978A is, but does a three hour delay for the photons match the disparity in speed we are seeing...

Anyway, it seems we might have the facilities to gather experimental evidence now, considering the *equipment you mention. If the gamma ray burst can be matched to a supernova going off in our neighborhood, then the time difference between that and the neutrino burst (if powerful enough to be detected) should demonstrate FTL travel.

* Of course, the missing thing is the supernova...and I don't really relish the thought having one anywhere nearby... :)

Edit: OK, I just remembered that neutrino emission is expected before light emission in a supernova. Since neutrinos pass right through the surrounding stellar matter from collapsing core, and the light is trapped for a while, the neutrino burst should be seen first. So maybe the three or so hours is just due to these effects. Still need to do the math and see how far in advance we should have got the neutrino burst in this event before the light.

Betruger
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Re: FTL Neutrinos?

Post by Betruger »

EricF wrote:So if I understand this right, they determined that the neutrino took
0.002434958 seconds to cover the 730km, vs the 0.002435018 seconds light would take.

That's quite a slim margin of error; are the instruments for detecting neutrinos really that calibrated that this couldn't simply be the result of the timing of the clocks at the starting location being nanoseconds off from the ones in the receiving location?
Over a 16,000 point data set? It would be quite a systematic error. The researched have admitted they can't figure out where such an error comes from.

Aero
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Re: FTL Neutrinos?

Post by Aero »

EricF wrote:So if I understand this right, they determined that the neutrino took
0.002434958 seconds to cover the 730km, vs the 0.002435018 seconds light would take.

That's quite a slim margin of error; are the instruments for detecting neutrinos really that calibrated that this couldn't simply be the result of the timing of the clocks at the starting location being nanoseconds off from the ones in the receiving location?
With the quoted error margin of 10 nanoseconds, that corresponds to ~6 to ~8 km/sec. If the supernova neutrino signal arrived 3 hours (=10,800 sec.) in advance of the light signal, then the distance (in light seconds) to the supernova is:
d-ls * 7 km/sec. = 10800 sec *c, where c = 299792.458 km/sec.
There are 31,536,000 seconds in a year.
I get 14.7 light years distance which is wrong on the face of it. A supernova that close would make us cinders, or more likely plasma.
Aero

Tom Ligon
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Post by Tom Ligon »

The numbers are not holding water. I ran a calculation on the time it would take a sound wave to reach from the core of our sun to the surface, and I think I came up with about 5 hours. A shock wave would be faster, but the progenitor star of core collapse supernova would be somewhat larger. So 3 hours is not unreasonable for the time for a shock wave from core collapse to cause visible effects at the surface.

SN1987A was 168000 LY out, or 1.47E+09 light hours. 3 hours is 2.04E-09 of that time. The article says the speed of light over the distance the neutrinos traveled in the CERN experiment was 2.4 milliseconds, with a difference of 60 nanoseconds. That's a ratio of 2.50E-05. So we're missing a factor of ten thousand here.

There was an earlier neutrino packet than the main ones, but the difference was only a few hours. If we were looking for a neutrino event FTL, we'd need to look for an anomoly about 4 years and 2 months earlier. If there was such an event, nobody would have drawn the connection to SN 1987A.

But I expect all the neutrino counts, especially anomolous concentrations, were recorded. I wonder if anybody is checking yet?

JoeP
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Post by JoeP »

Nice back of the envelope work.

Just found this: http://www.cosmosmagazine.com/news/4775 ... d-neutrino
Nicole Bell, a senior lecturer in theoretical particle physics at the University of Melbourne in Australia, pointed to an example from astronomy that seems to refute the latest results.

It comes from a star that went supernova in 1987 within the Large Magellanic Cloud galaxy.

Supernovae are formed when stars explode as they get too large or reach the end of their lives. As part of the radiation emitted when they do this, they release neutrinos and light.

The Kamioka Nucleon Decay Experiment detector in Japan picked up neutrinos from the explosion three hours before light from supernova event reached Earth.

"However, this does not mean the neutrinos travelled faster than the speed of light. It just means that the neutrinos left the supernova first, while the light was trapped in the supernova for longer before it could get out," said Bell.

If the neutrinos from the explosion actually had been travelling faster than the speed of light, like the CERN experiment suggests, they would have reached Earth years, rather than hours, before the light did, explained Bell.

"In a way, you can regard the supernova observation as an independent experiment result which refutes the OPERA measurement."
Still, this guy isn't checking the records for earlier neutrino bursts. No doubt someone will though. If Tom's numbers are right, then we should have picked something up around four years prior. If the detectors were even operational at that earlier point in time.

icarus
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Post by icarus »

The moving neutrino time was retarded by 60 nanoseconds? (C constant just not for all observers ... drop that whole other thing relativity's got going on although it may make the astronomers a little sweaty ...)

Then there are also those unexplained anomalous studies showing faster than light speed galaxy motions ...

http://www.haltonarp.com/

Aero
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Post by Aero »

Here is the easy solution, let's improve the standard model, like this:
"Nothing can apear to travel faster than the speed of light plus seven km/sec."
Now its all better and there is nothing to debate. See how easy that was!

On a more serious note, some might find this press release from CERN interesting.
http://press.web.cern.ch/press/PressRel ... 9.11E.html
Aero

AcesHigh
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Post by AcesHigh »

maybe neutrinos are NOT faster than light (explaining the supernova results)


and yet, they arrived earlier both on CERN and on Supernovas (although not by the expected margin (by a long shot), on Supernovas, as if they were really faster than light)


so what can this mean? They made an hyperjump when they were created?

Aero
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Post by Aero »

AcesHigh wrote:maybe neutrinos are NOT faster than light (explaining the supernova results)


and yet, they arrived earlier both on CERN and on Supernovas (although not by the expected margin (by a long shot), on Supernovas, as if they were really faster than light)


so what can this mean? They made an hyperjump when they were created?
No no, not when they are origionally created. They hyperjump during the transitions from one kind to another kind of neutrino.

Really, waiting seems to be the order of the day here on talk-polywell, so we should wait for confirmation or refutation of the experiment. Of course, that's no fun, much more fun to speculate.
Aero

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