A new Boson?

[Alex K]

Jehanne,

the Opera neutrino time of flight measurement was rather different in character for several reasons - first of all it was just one number, a timing measurement. The LHC detectors register complex events, in this case with two high energy photons coming out of a collision, and there is little doubt that the excess as seen has indeed occurred - the one opera timing number was off because of a faulty connector. Events as we see them here cannot just be faked by a simple fault in the machine like a loose wire. One more difference: having a new particle that would make such a signature in the LHC is theoretically quite plausible (i.e. it is not hard to write down a mathematically consistent model that produces such effects) whereas I myself have published a paper back in the day showing that it is basically theoretically impossible to have superluminal neutrinos the way Opera seemed to observe them for reasons I can go into if you're interested.

The Opera superluminal neutrino measurement was wrong due to a loose optical connector, this signal here is probably nothing because it will turn out to be an accidental statistical upward fluctuation rather than a systematic error in the experiments.

It was not, however, an overnight correction:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faster-tha...no_anomaly

A significant number of physicists believed in their faster-than-light result for over an entire year, even to the point of replicating it.

I can't confirm that anyone really believed it - It was too out there. That doesn't mean that many theorists, including myself, didn't entertain the possibility that it might be true for the sake of speculation and worked out the consequences for the fun of it. It really was a lot of fun to try and dream up consistent theory how neutrinos can be faster than light without violating all the other observations.

Many of the members of the experiment didn't even want to be on the initial publication. Of course you have to try to replicate it if your experiment produces an unexpected result - that doesn't have anything to do with believing in it - what else were they going to do? Of course they need to replicate it (in this case using modified beams optimized for measuring the timing signal) to gain a better understanding of their experiment and the source of the deviation. That it wasn't an overnight correction is only due to the fact that it took so long to identify the faulty connection that was the source of the deviation.