Almost no intrinsic dispersion in OPERA’s 20 new neutrinos!

With OPERA adding details of their 20 single-neutrino measurements from the past few weeks to their preprint (which they have now submitted for publication), we now get a good idea of how sharp the 60-nanosecond advance (ahead of the speed of light) is for different neutrinos.

The results are absolutely astounding. Figure 18 of their updated paper shows that they are contained within a 50-nanosecond bin, from 40 to 90 nanoseconds (with the average being 62 nanoseconds). The reason that this is remarkable is that their synchronization of the OPERA master clock to the GPS timing is itself quantized within a 50-nanosecond-wide bin. Individual neutrino events could fall anywhere within this bin (i.e. the error in timing could be anywhere between -25 and +25 nanoseconds).

Their result implies that, over time, if they collected enough events (if they were still running the single-neutrino experiment), the distribution of received times may look very much like the distribution caused by the clock calibration itself. But if the neutrino travel time itself had any substantial distribution — say, if higher-energy neutrinos were slower than lower-energy ones — then this distribution would be convolved with the clock jitter.

But this is not seen.

This confirms what seemed evident in their September results: there is almost no intrinsic dispersion in travel times for their neutrinos.

It is difficult to see how this result could be reconciled with any version of Einsteinian or non-Einsteinian mechanics, if it is assumed that it is the neutrinos traveling a little bit faster than light over the 730 km to Italy.

The only remaining alternatives are that there is indeed a 60-nanosecond systematic uncertainty plaguing the experiment, or that there is an almost-constant 60-nanosecond advance occurring near the production point at CERN.

I have put forward the latter conjecture in my two previous blog posts.

OPERA really needs to perform a timing detection of muons at the far end of the hadron stop — at CERN — to confirm or rule out this possibility.

 

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