“I want to congratulate you on this extremely beautiful experiment,” said Nobel laureate Samuel Ting of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge during the question and answer session that followed Autiero’s talk.
Neutrinos faster than light 2018 upgrade#
His project, the MINOS experiment at Fermilab, has already requested an upgrade to their timing system so they can replicate the results, perhaps as soon as 2014. Other physicists are impressed.”This is certainly very precise timing, more than you need to record for normal accelerator operations,” Plunkett told New Scientist. The researchers also accounted for an odd feature of general relativity in which clocks at different heights keep different times. Just to be sure, the collaboration had two independent metrology teams from Switzerland and Germany check their work. “These kinds of techniques that we have been using are maybe unusual in high energy physics, but they are quite standard in metrology,” Autiero said. That linked the labs’ timekeepers to within one nanosecond. To determine exactly when the neutrinos left CERN and arrived at Gran Sasso, the team hooked both detectors to caesium clocks, which can measure time to an accuracy of one second in about 30 million years.
Neutrinos faster than light 2018 plus#
Combining that with the known position of the neutrino source at CERN gave a distance of 730,534.61 metres, plus or minus 20 centimetres. The GPS measurements, which were so accurate they could detect the crawling drift of the planet’s tectonic plates, gave precise benchmarks for each side of the tunnel, allowing the researchers to triangulate the underground detector’s position in the planet. To pinpoint its position precisely, the researchers stopped traffic in one lane of a 10-kilometre long highway tunnel for a week to place GPS receivers on either side.
At that depth Earth’s crust shields OPERA (which stands for Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) from noise-inducing cosmic rays, but also obscures its exact latitude and longitude. The detector in the Gran Sasso cavern is located 1400 metres underground. “These are experiments where the devil is in the details – the details of how each piece of equipment works, and how it all goes together,” said Rob Plunkett of Fermilab in Batavia, Illinois.
0 kommentar(er)
