Swifter than a speeding neutrino they were not, but explanations for the news that subatomic particles apparently travelled faster than light have still arrived remarkably fast.
"It is really impressive how many papers there are so quickly," says mathematician Peter Woit?, author of the physics blog Not Even Wrong. "It is kind of standard procedure--when there's some new exciting experimental results, everyone wants to be the first to explain it. But this seems a bit even more so than usual."
On 23 September, physicists with the OPERA experiment in Italy said they had caught neutrinos arriving from the CERN particle physics lab in Switzerland 60 nanoseconds sooner than light. That seemed to violate Einstein's theory of special relativity.
Since then, papers have gushed into the physics preprint website (arxiv.org) suggesting numerous ways to account for the extraordinary claim.
Some knock the result. Nobel laureate Sheldon Glashow and colleagues point out that faster-than-light neutrinos ought to produce shock waves, which in turn would produce "virtual" particles that should rob the neutrinos of energy (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6562). If they were ever faster than light, they wouldn't stay at that speed for long enough to account for OPERA's results.
Others potential flaws are more prosaic: some papers try to pinpoint hidden sources of error, like a mis-synchronisation of the clocks at either end of the neutrino beam (arxiv.org/abs/1109.6160).
Still others explore ways in which the OPERA results line up, or conflict with earlier limits on neutrinos' flight speeds, from supernova SN1987a, for example (arxiv.org/abs/1109.5682, arxiv.org/abs/1109.5917) and other detectors.
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