RE: Speed-of-light experiments give baffling result at Cern
September 27, 2011 at 9:40 am
(This post was last modified: September 27, 2011 at 9:50 am by little_monkey.)
(September 27, 2011 at 8:42 am)lanceromega Wrote: Or it can be that Neutrinos are in fact tachyons, back in the 90's several attempts to measure the mass of neutrinos yielded results that point toward the fact that they may have possess imaginary mass, which is the same mass Tachyon possess.
Any normal particle possessing a real mass would have varying velocities depending on momentum and kinetic energy, no experiment to date has have clocked a slow Neutrino. As a matter of fact the universe at large should have layer of Neutrino condensate occupying large potion of space due to the large outburst of neutrinos from the big bang, this layer of condensate should be detectable via gravitational effects yet no observation of this has occured.
If the Neutrinos are tachyons they could never be at rest, this would match all observation to date, Neutrinos from big bang would be the source of Dark energy that is causing the speeding up of inflation. Tachyons gain speed as they lose energy, which would occur as the cloud of neutrinos travel outward from from the intial singularty. The pressure from the accelerating neutrinos would cause universe to expand.
This same effect would explain why supernova neutrino are slower as they would actually be at a higher energy then those produce in the experiment, there velocity would be very close to that of a photon and almost appear to be traveling at speed of light and not faster.
The bartender says: we don't serve tachyons in this bar.
A tachyon walks into a a bar.
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On a more serious note, if the neutrinos were tachyonic, their velocity would be energy dependent. This is not what the OPERA team have found:
At 13.9 GeV: (v-c)/c = (2.16 ± 0.76 ± 0.30) x 10-5
At 42.9 GeV: (v-c)/c = (2.74 ± 0.74 ± 0.30) x 10-5
These can be compared with the independent result from MINOS, a similar experiment in the US with a baseline of almost exactly the same length but lower energy beams.
At 3 GeV: (v-c)/c = (5.1 ± 2.9) x 10-5
