The OPERA neutrinos had energies of about 17 gigaelectron volts. "We have investigated whether pion decays would produce superluminal neutrinos, assuming energy and momentum are conserved," he says. In their journal article, Cowsik and an international team of collaborators took a close look at the first step of this process. The muons were stopped at the end of the tunnel, but the neutrinos, which slip through matter like ghosts through walls, passed through the barrier and disappeared in the direction of Gran Sasso. The neutrinos in the experiment were created by slamming speeding protons into a stationary target, producing a pulse of pions - unstable particles that were magnetically focused into a long tunnel where they decayed in flight into muons and neutrinos. So superluminal (faster than light) neutrinos should not exist. According to the theory of special relativity, any particle that has mass may come close to but cannot quite reach the speed of light. Neutrinos are thought to have a tiny, but nonzero, mass. OPERA reported online and in Physics Letters B in September that the neutrinos arrived at Gran Sasso some 60 nanoseconds sooner than they would have arrived if they were traveling at the speed of light in a vacuum. The OPERA experiment, a collaboration between the CERN physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, and the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Gran Sasso, Italy, timed particles called neutrinos traveling through Earth from the physics laboratory CERN to a detector in an underground laboratory in Gran Sasso, a distance of some 730 kilometers, or about 450 miles. 24 issue of Physical Review Letters, Cowsik and his collaborators put their finger on what appears to be an insurmountable problem with the experiment. Responding to the call was Ramanath Cowsik, PhD, professor of physics in Arts & Sciences and director of the McDonnell Center for the Space Sciences at Washington University in St.
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