Still faster than light
IN SEPTEMBER a furore erupted among physicists after it emerged that neutrinos—diaphanous particles which pervade the universe but rarely interact with anything—appear to be travelling faster than light. Since neutrinos are thought to have mass, and since Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity posits that accelerating any non-zero mass to the speed of light requires infinite energy, this implied that Einstein was not quite right. Either that, or the researchers who sent their neutrinos from CERN (Europe's, and the world's, main particle-physics facility, outside Geneva) 730km through the Earth's crust, to a huge detector sitting under the mountain of Gran Sasso in Italy's Apennines, made a mistake.
Now, relativity is looking, if anything, slightly shakier still. The Italian Institute for Nuclear Physics (INFN), which runs the Gran Sasso lab, has just confirmed the earlier result based on a re-examination of the old data. Crucially, it also replicated the finding with an all-new batch of neutrinos. The paper outlining the latest research has been posted on arXiv, an online database, and submitted to the Journal of High Energy Physics.
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