SPEEDY NEUTRINOS... SO THREE-DIMENSIONAL

摘要

Could sterile neutrinos explain the weirdest neutrino result to date? In September last year, researchers with the OPERA experiment beneath the Cran Sasso mountain in Italy reported that neutrinos travelling there from CERN near Geneva, Switzerland, had outpaced the speed of light. That sent shock waves through the physics world, since it apparently violated Einstein's special theory of relativity. At first, Tom Weiler of Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, thought sterile neutrinos might be able to explain the observation. Because they interact so weakly with matter, Weiler and colleagues thought they might have access to extra dimensions. They suggested that the OPERA neutrinos could have morphed into sterile neutrinos mid-flight, taken a shortcut through an extra dimension, and appeared at the detector 60 nanoseconds early.