A paper in the December 24 issue of Physical Review Letters goes to work on the finding of supposed faster-than-light neutrinos by the OPERA experiment. The FTL story has been popping up ever since OPERA — a collaboration between the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso? (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy and the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva — reported last September that neutrinos from CERN had arrived at Gran Sasso’s underground facilities 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have been expected to arrive if travelling at the speed of light.
The resultant explosion of interest was understandable. Because neutrinos are now thought to have a non-zero mass, an FTL neutrino would be in direct violation of the theory of special relativity, which says that no object with mass can attain the speed of light. Now Ramanath Cowsik (Washington University, St. Louis) and collaborators have examined whether an FTL result was possible. Neutrinos in the experiment were produced by particle collisions that produced a stream of pions. The latter are unstable and decayed into muons and neutrinos.
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