Antonio Ereditato, the physicist who leads OPERA, made it clear that while the team had looked hard for any measurement errors or other mistakes that could explain it, and found none, the results still needed careful checking: “After many months of studies and cross checks we have not found any instrumental effect that could explain the result of the measurement. While OPERA researchers will continue their studies, we are also looking forward to independent measurements to fully assess the nature of this observation.”
John Learned, a neutrino astronomer at the University of Hawaii, said that if the results of the OPERA researchers turned out to be true, it could be the first hint that neutrinos can take a shortcut through space, through extra dimensions. Joe Lykken of Fermilab said, “Special relativity only holds in flat space, so if there is a warped fifth dimension, it is possible that on other slices of it, the speed of light is different.”
The results were announced at a special seminar at CERN today, which coincided with the publication of a research paper describing the experiments. The Gran Sasso National Laboratory, the world’s largest underground particle physics Laboratory is located under a mountain in central Italy. The CERN, (European Center for Nuclear Research), complex operates a network of six accelerators and a decelerator including the worlds largest particle accelerator the Large Hadron Collider or LHC.
Neutrinos are electrically neutral particles so small that only recently were they found to have mass.