Showing posts with label Light. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Light. Show all posts

Sunday, 8 April 2012

Tailored optical material from DNA: Nano spiral staircases modify light

There was a lot of excitement a few years ago following the discovery of the DNA origami technique. The approach could be used to build nanoparticles of a given shape and size. However, real applications, such as nano-tweezers, remained out of reach. An international team of researchers led by Professor Tim Liedl of the Ludwig-Maximillians-Universitaet Muenchen and Professor Friedrich Simmel of the Technische Universitaet Muenchen have now succeeded in building nanoparticles using optically active DNA building blocks that can be used to modify light in very specific ways.

Coupling light and nanostructures may help significantly reduce the size of optical sensors for medical and environmental applications, while at the same time making them more sensitive. However, the size of a light wave stretching out over 400 to 800 nanometers is gigantic in comparison to nanostructures of only a few nanometers. Yet in theory, when tiniest structures work together in very specific ways, even small objects can interact very well with light. Unfortunately it is not possible to produce the requisite three-dimensional structures with nano-scale precision in sufficient quantities and purity using conventional methods.

Nano spiral staircases modify light
Enlarge

A team of scientists from Technische Universitaet Muenchen and Ludwig-Maximilians-Universitaet Muenchen succeeded in building up nano spiral staircases from artificial DNA using the DNA-origami method. The DNA strand carries nine gold particles which lead to strong interactions with circular polarized visible light. Credit: Animation: Tim Liedl /LMU

"With DNA origami, we have now found a methodology that fulfills all of these requirements. It makes it possible to define in advance and with nanometer precision the three-dimensional shape of the object being created," says Professor Friedrich Simmel, who holds the Chair for Biomolecular Systems and Bionanotechnology at the TU Muenchen. Programmed solely using the sequence of basic building blocks, the nano-elements fold themselves into the desired structures." Friedrich Simmel's team successfully built nano spiral staircases 57 nanometers high and 34 nanometers in diameter with 10 nanometer gold particles attached at regular intervals.

On the surface of the gold particles the electrons react with the electromagnetic field of the light. The small clearance between the particles ensures that the gold particles of a DNA strand work in unison, thereby amplifying the interactions many fold. Professor Alexander O. Govorov, theoretical physicist at the Ohio State University in Athens, USA, had predicted that the effect should depend on the spacing, size and composition of the metal particles. Using the DNA origami method, the Munich physicists built up nanostructures in which they varied these parameters.

The results of these experiments confirm the predictions of their colleagues in every regard: Aqueous solutions of right-handed and left-handed nano spiral staircases differ visibly in their interactions with circular polarized light. Spiral staircases with large particles show a significantly stronger optical response than those with small particles. The chemical composition of the particles also had a large effect: When the gold particles were coated with a layer of silver, the optical resonance shifted from the red to the shorter wave blue domain.

By combining theoretical calculations and the possibilities of DNA origami, the researchers are now able to produce nano-optical materials with precisely specified characteristics. Professor Tim Liedl describes the path the research might follow: "We will now investigate whether we can use this method to influence the refraction index of the materials we manufacture. Materials with a negative refractive index could be used to develop novel optical lens systems – so-called super lenses."

More information: DNA-based Self-Assembly of Chiral Plasmonic Nanostructures with Tailored Optical Response. Anton Kuzyk, Robert Schreiber, Zhiyuan Fan, Günther Pardatscher, Eva-Maria Roller, Alexander Högele, Friedrich C. Simmel, Alexander O. Govorov und Tim Liedl.
Nature Volume 482, 7389, pp 311-314. DOI: 10.1038/nature10889

Provided by Technische Universitaet Muenchen


View the original article here

Friday, 2 March 2012

Earth Sheds Light on Alien Worlds

Scientists use light reflected back to Earth from the moon to get a planet-wide picture. It is the angle, or polarization, of the light that is key. Scientists would like to get a look at Earthshine without having it bounce off the moon.

Using the moon as a giant mirror, scientists looked at reflected light from Earth and figured out a way to pick out telltale signs of life, a practice run for looking for life on planets beyond the solar system.

The research builds on earlier work to collect all the light reflected off Earth and analyze it for the chemical fingerprints of vegetation, oxygen, water and other signs of life. Rather than looking at the brightness, however, the scientists study how the light is polarized, a measurement that can more easily be made from very distant exoplanets as well.

PHOTOS: Top Ten Places to Find Alien Life

“In the past, there have been very accurate polarization measurements of the Earth's blue sky from the ground and these measurements showed the absorption bands (of gases) and the vegetation very clearly. However, those were local measurements -- a small path of the sky overhead -- so they didn't prove you can also see it in the whole Earth observations,” Daphne Stam, with the Netherlands Institute for Space Research, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

In exoplanet research, polarization is a very useful tool for two reasons, adds Christoph Keller, a professor of experimental physics at The Netherlands’ Leiden Observatory.

First is that starlight reflected by an exoplanet is polarized, like sunlight bouncing off Earth, but the light coming directly from the star is not.

“Polarization measurements are like filters that block the much brighter starlight and let only the much dimmer exoplanet light through,” Keller told Discovery News.

Second, is that these measurements of polarized light contain much more information about the surface and atmosphere of planets than regular measurements of light’s intensity.

NEWS: Would Aliens Kill Us?

“Polarization, for instance, can say something about the size and composition of liquid droplets and small particles in a planetary atmosphere,” Keller said.

Ideally, scientists would like to get a look at Earthshine without having it bounce off the moon, but instruments to make that measurement from space currently don’t exist.

“This is the only way to see the Earth (as) it looks from space, but actually observing from the ground,” lead researcher Michael Sterzik, deputy director of the European Space Agency’s La Silla Paranal Observatory in Chile, wrote in an email to Discovery News.

“The final motivation is to establish a viable astronomical techniques to study and analyze the atmopsheres and surfaces of exoplanets, and in particular biosignatures,” Sterzik added.

For now, since Earth is the only example of a life-hosting planet, it is the best stand-in for Earth-like planets beyond.

Sterzik’s research appears in this week’s Nature.


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Saturday, 14 January 2012

Speed of Light Update

Albert EinsteinIt's been a couple of months since the news came out that the OPERA experiment at CERN got results which indicated that some neutrinos were moving faster than the speed of light.

Why the Speed of Light Limit?

This result was certainly surprising, because Einstein's theory of relativity - a theory which has been confirmed over and over again - places a speed limit on the universe, and that limit is the speed of light. As I've explained before, the equations of relativity indicate that it's impossible to accelerate to the speed of light. And if you take a speed that's greater than the speed of light and plug it into the equations, the results give you nonsensical answers, like imaginary energy! (An imaginary number is when you take a square root of a negative number.)

In other words, if the speed of light can be broken, then one of the fundamental principles that we thought we understood about the universe is clearly incomplete or invalid.

It's a very exciting time for physicists!

Skepticism Abounds

However, physicists are appropriately skeptical about such a claim. To overturn a century of consistent experimental evidence in support of the theory, it'll take more than just one anomalous result. That's how things work in science, after all. A theory is in place, confirmed by evidence, but there can be a gradual accumulation of data that refutes the theory. Scientists then have to revise or refine the theory in order to explain the new data. This is exactly how Albert Einstein originally developed his theory of relativity, in fact, to resolve holes in the previous theories of gravitation and electrodynamics.

Experimentalists have examined the results to see if they could find a flaw in the experiment, to show that these results are incorrect. Meanwhile, theorists have been trying to figure how they could explain the result if it turns out to be true. So far, there's been little success, because each proposed explanation runs into various problems by contradicting other known properties of the universe.

Refining the Test

The experiment works because a bunch of neutrinos created at CERN travel 730 kilometers to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. These neutrinos are created by collisions back at CERN, so one of the possible sources of error could be that the physicists don't exactly know which neutrino came from which collision. There are statistical methods that physicists use in these cases, and they're generally considered accurate enough, but in this case it is one point of "fuzziness" that may have resulted in the unusual results.

Physicists like to tackle these challenges head on, though, so they worked to eliminate the fuzziness. Instead of having a more continuous collision (and thus a more continuous beam of neutrinos), they broke the beam up into short, 3-nanosecond pulses. Each tiny pulse underwent a collision, and then the neutrinos traveled to the Italian detector.

The results were consistent with the earlier findings - the neutrinos arrived approximately 60 nanoseconds before they should have been able to. The neutrinos still seem to be moving faster than the speed of light.

However, one problem of this new approach is that they got a lot fewer results. They were only able to conduct this test about 20 times. Further tests will need to be run, both at CERN and in other laboratories. If this is a result which only shows up in the OPERA experiment, there will continue to be the possibility that it's some sort of equipment issue rather than an actual violation of a basic law of physics. Confirming results carried out somewhere else would make this claim a lot more solid and go a long way toward convincing the physics community that it's correct.

If the experimentalists are able to replicate the results, then the race will really be on for the theoretical physicists to come up with an explanation that works.

Related Articles:


View the original article here

Tuesday, 3 January 2012

Detecting Light Echoes from Ancient Star Eruption

Between 1838 and 1858, the star Eta Carinae underwent its "Great Eruption," making it the second brightest star in the sky. Astronomers at the time didn't have the technology to study the event in detail. Today, with the help of 170-year old light echoing off Eta Carinae's nebula, astronomers have been able to study the eruption.

During the mid 1800's, the well known star Eta Carinae underwent an enormous eruption becoming, for a time, the second brightest star in the sky.

Although 19th Century astronomers did not yet have the technology to study one of the largest eruptions in recent history in depth, astronomers from the Space Telescope Science Institute recently discovered that light echoes are just now reaching us.

This discovery allows astronomers to use modern instruments to study Eta Carinae as it was between 1838 and 1858 when it underwent its Great Eruption.

Light echoes have been made famous in recent years by the dramatic example of V838 Monocerotis. While V838 Mon looks like an expanding shell of gas, what is actually depicted is light reflecting off shells of gas and dust that was thrown off earlier in the star's life.

ANALYSIS: Stars Caught in Fiery Merger

The extra distance the light had to travel to strike the shell, before being reflected towards observers on Earth, means that the light arrives later. In the case of Eta Carinae, nearly 170 years later!

The reflected light has its properties changed by the motion of the material off which it reflects. In particular, the light shows a notable blueshift, telling astronomers that the material itself is traveling 210 km/sec.

This observation fits with theoretical predictions of eruptions similar to the type Eta Carinae is thought to have undergone. However, the light echo has also highlighted some discrepancies between expectation and observation.

Typically, Eta Carinae's eruption is classified as a "supernova impostor." This title is fitting since the eruptions create a large change in the overall brightness.

However, although these events may release 10 percent of the total energy of a typical supernova or more, the star remains intact.

ANALYSIS: New Class of Variable Star Discovered

The main model to explain such eruptions is that a sudden increase in the star's energy output causes some of the outer layers to be blown off in an opaque wind. This shell of material is so thick, that it gives a large increase in the effective surface area from which light is emitted, thereby increasing the overall brightness.

For this to happen, models predict that the temperature of the star prior to the eruption needs to be at least 7,000 K. Analyzing the reflected light from the eruption places the temperature of Eta Carinae at the time of the eruption at a much lower 5,000 K.

This would suggest that the favored model for such events is incorrect and that another model, involving an energetic blast was (a mini-supernova), may be the true culprit, at least in Eta Carinae's case.

Yet this observation is somewhat at odds with observations made in the years following the eruption.

As spectrography came into use, astronomers in 1870 visually noticed emission lines in the star's spectrum which is more typical in hotter stars.

ANALYSIS: Super-Duper Supernovas in a Class All By Themselves

In 1890, Eta Carinae had a smaller eruption and a photographic spectrum put the temperature around 6,000 K. While this may not accurately reflect the case of the Great Eruption, it is still puzzling how the star's temperature could change so quickly and may also indicate that the favored model of the opaque-wind model is a better fit for later times or the smaller eruption. This suggests two different mechanisms causing similar results in the same object on short timescales.

Either way, Eta Carinae is a marvelous object. The team has also identified several other areas in the shell surrounding the star which appear to be brightening and undergoing their own echoes which the team promises to continue to observe which would allow them to verify their findings.


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Friday, 16 December 2011

Amazing 'Light Trucks' So Bright, They're Banned

Dekotora-622

There's a great slideshow on the Daily Mail highlighting these super bright, super pimped-out trucks, which have been banned from Japanese roadways. They're a part of a Japanese hobby/competition called "Dekotora," which involves decorating trucks with lights and themes. These trucks are so bright, they distract drivers and could cause accidents.

Every square inch of these vehicles, it seems, is covered in lights, murals, chrome and bling. Many use up so much electricity, they require special generators to power the accessories and even then, they can only run for 20 minutes before the engine overheats.

For more photos, click on the link to the slideshow.

Dekotora-Cielo-622

Credit: Wikimedia Commons




View the original article here

Monday, 12 December 2011

Speed of Light Update

Albert EinsteinIt's been a couple of months since the news came out that the OPERA experiment at CERN got results which indicated that some neutrinos were moving faster than the speed of light.

Why the Speed of Light Limit?

This result was certainly surprising, because Einstein's theory of relativity - a theory which has been confirmed over and over again - places a speed limit on the universe, and that limit is the speed of light. As I've explained before, the equations of relativity indicate that it's impossible to accelerate to the speed of light. And if you take a speed that's greater than the speed of light and plug it into the equations, the results give you nonsensical answers, like imaginary energy! (An imaginary number is when you take a square root of a negative number.)

In other words, if the speed of light can be broken, then one of the fundamental principles that we thought we understood about the universe is clearly incomplete or invalid.

It's a very exciting time for physicists!

Skepticism Abounds

However, physicists are appropriately skeptical about such a claim. To overturn a century of consistent experimental evidence in support of the theory, it'll take more than just one anomalous result. That's how things work in science, after all. A theory is in place, confirmed by evidence, but there can be a gradual accumulation of data that refutes the theory. Scientists then have to revise or refine the theory in order to explain the new data. This is exactly how Albert Einstein originally developed his theory of relativity, in fact, to resolve holes in the previous theories of gravitation and electrodynamics.

Experimentalists have examined the results to see if they could find a flaw in the experiment, to show that these results are incorrect. Meanwhile, theorists have been trying to figure how they could explain the result if it turns out to be true. So far, there's been little success, because each proposed explanation runs into various problems by contradicting other known properties of the universe.

Refining the Test

The experiment works because a bunch of neutrinos created at CERN travel 730 kilometers to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. These neutrinos are created by collisions back at CERN, so one of the possible sources of error could be that the physicists don't exactly know which neutrino came from which collision. There are statistical methods that physicists use in these cases, and they're generally considered accurate enough, but in this case it is one point of "fuzziness" that may have resulted in the unusual results.

Physicists like to tackle these challenges head on, though, so they worked to eliminate the fuzziness. Instead of having a more continuous collision (and thus a more continuous beam of neutrinos), they broke the beam up into short, 3-nanosecond pulses. Each tiny pulse underwent a collision, and then the neutrinos traveled to the Italian detector.

The results were consistent with the earlier findings - the neutrinos arrived approximately 60 nanoseconds before they should have been able to. The neutrinos still seem to be moving faster than the speed of light.

However, one problem of this new approach is that they got a lot fewer results. They were only able to conduct this test about 20 times. Further tests will need to be run, both at CERN and in other laboratories. If this is a result which only shows up in the OPERA experiment, there will continue to be the possibility that it's some sort of equipment issue rather than an actual violation of a basic law of physics. Confirming results carried out somewhere else would make this claim a lot more solid and go a long way toward convincing the physics community that it's correct.

If the experimentalists are able to replicate the results, then the race will really be on for the theoretical physicists to come up with an explanation that works.

Related Articles:


View the original article here

Saturday, 10 December 2011

Dead Sea Sediments Shed Light on Biblical Events

The Dead Sea may have almost completely dried up 120,000 years ago. This new finding raises concerns that the politically contentious body of water could disappear again. Analysis of Dead Sea sediments may also deepen our understanding of Biblical events.

The Dead Sea nearly disappeared about 120,000 years ago, say researchers who drilled more than 1,500 feet below one of the deepest parts of the politically contentious body of water.

The discovery looms large at a time when the Dead Sea is shrinking rapidly, Middle Eastern nations are battling over water rights, and experts hotly debate whether the salt lake could ever dry up completely in the years to come.

New data from drilled deposits are also helping piece together geological history that slices through Biblical times. Further research may offer opportunities to verify whether earthquakes destroyed the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah or if drought explains why Joseph brought Israelites to Egypt to escape famine.

"We see a lot of these different stories in the Bible about fat years and lean years," said Steven Goldstein, a geochemist at Columbia University in New York. "And we can see in the record that there were these intervals where it looks like it was a land of milk and honey, and there were intervals where there was no water, no rain and I'm sure, famine. Climate validates that there were these rhythms."

NEWS: Resurrecting the Dead Sea

The new research started, not as an attempt to investigate Biblical events, but to understand the history of the Dead Sea, which has been drying up at dramatic rates in recent decades. As a result of both evaporation and intensive human demands for water from inflowing rivers, the surface of the lake dropped 23 meters (75 feet) from 1930 to 2000, said Emi Ito, a geochemist at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities.

And the lake's rate of shrinking seems to be accelerating. From 2000 to 2008, levels dropped 8 m (26 feet), with another 1.5 m (5 feet) lost in 2010 alone.

Even as the lake's salty shores recede, though, scientists have long debated whether it could ever totally dry up. Because the water is so salty and because salt and water molecules attract each other, many modeling studies have suggested that some amount of water will always remain there.

To see if history could help settle that debate and others, an international team of researchers drilled down about 460 m (more than 1,500 feet) into sediments of the Dead Sea in Israeli territory at a spot that was just slightly shallower than the lake's deepest point, which lay on the other side of the border in Jordan. The cores they pulled up stretched back 200,000 years.

At a level corresponding with 120,000 years ago, during a warm period between ice ages, the researchers found a layer of small round pebbles sitting on top of 45 meters (nearly 150 feet) of thick salt deposits. Those pebbles, they announced this week at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco, look just like the rocks that normally appear on the lake's beaches -- suggesting that one of the deepest parts of the lake was once dry.

"It seems as though the lake may have dried out or got very close to drying out without human intervention," Ito said. "We may have to revise our thinking that the Dead Sea cannot dry out."

That very dry period many millennia ago was much hotter than it is today, said Jiwchar Ganor, an environmental geochemist at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev in Israel. Humidity was lower. And there was less water flowing into the lake then there is today.

NEWS: Dead Sea Scrolls Made Locally, Tests Show

He doubts the lake actually dried up altogether then -- or that it will disappear completely in the future, even as it keeps shrinking at an alarming rate.

"We can say that even without changing climate, it will continue to drop," Ganor said. "But it will still be at a higher level than what it was in the time they found here."

Still, there's no way to know how modern-day human interventions will interact with future climate change to affect the Dead Sea. And if the Dead Sea could become mostly dry once, the concern is that it could happen again, raising the likelihood for wars over water and the loss of still mostly unstudied life forms that manage to thrive in such saline waters.

Meanwhile, historians and Biblical scholars are watching closely to see what the next stages of research will turn up in the sediments, which reveal details of past climate and earthquakes.

Book XV of the Antiquities of the Jews, for example, describes an earthquake that destroyed Judea and killed 30,000 people. And the Book of Joshua tells of a quake that tumbled the walls of Jericho and stopped the Jordan River from flowing, allowing the Israelites to pass through.

Perhaps the Dead Sea harbors answers to these ancient mysteries.


View the original article here

Thursday, 8 December 2011

Speed of Light Update

Albert EinsteinIt's been a couple of months since the news came out that the OPERA experiment at CERN got results which indicated that some neutrinos were moving faster than the speed of light.

Why the Speed of Light Limit?

This result was certainly surprising, because Einstein's theory of relativity - a theory which has been confirmed over and over again - places a speed limit on the universe, and that limit is the speed of light. As I've explained before, the equations of relativity indicate that it's impossible to accelerate to the speed of light. And if you take a speed that's greater than the speed of light and plug it into the equations, the results give you nonsensical answers, like imaginary energy! (An imaginary number is when you take a square root of a negative number.)

In other words, if the speed of light can be broken, then one of the fundamental principles that we thought we understood about the universe is clearly incomplete or invalid.

It's a very exciting time for physicists!

Skepticism Abounds

However, physicists are appropriately skeptical about such a claim. To overturn a century of consistent experimental evidence in support of the theory, it'll take more than just one anomalous result. That's how things work in science, after all. A theory is in place, confirmed by evidence, but there can be a gradual accumulation of data that refutes the theory. Scientists then have to revise or refine the theory in order to explain the new data. This is exactly how Albert Einstein originally developed his theory of relativity, in fact, to resolve holes in the previous theories of gravitation and electrodynamics.

Experimentalists have examined the results to see if they could find a flaw in the experiment, to show that these results are incorrect. Meanwhile, theorists have been trying to figure how they could explain the result if it turns out to be true. So far, there's been little success, because each proposed explanation runs into various problems by contradicting other known properties of the universe.

Refining the Test

The experiment works because a bunch of neutrinos created at CERN travel 730 kilometers to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. These neutrinos are created by collisions back at CERN, so one of the possible sources of error could be that the physicists don't exactly know which neutrino came from which collision. There are statistical methods that physicists use in these cases, and they're generally considered accurate enough, but in this case it is one point of "fuzziness" that may have resulted in the unusual results.

Physicists like to tackle these challenges head on, though, so they worked to eliminate the fuzziness. Instead of having a more continuous collision (and thus a more continuous beam of neutrinos), they broke the beam up into short, 3-nanosecond pulses. Each tiny pulse underwent a collision, and then the neutrinos traveled to the Italian detector.

The results were consistent with the earlier findings - the neutrinos arrived approximately 60 nanoseconds before they should have been able to. The neutrinos still seem to be moving faster than the speed of light.

However, one problem of this new approach is that they got a lot fewer results. They were only able to conduct this test about 20 times. Further tests will need to be run, both at CERN and in other laboratories. If this is a result which only shows up in the OPERA experiment, there will continue to be the possibility that it's some sort of equipment issue rather than an actual violation of a basic law of physics. Confirming results carried out somewhere else would make this claim a lot more solid and go a long way toward convincing the physics community that it's correct.

If the experimentalists are able to replicate the results, then the race will really be on for the theoretical physicists to come up with an explanation that works.

Related Articles:


View the original article here

Monday, 5 December 2011

Speed of Light Update

Albert EinsteinIt's been a couple of months since the news came out that the OPERA experiment at CERN got results which indicated that some neutrinos were moving faster than the speed of light.

Why the Speed of Light Limit?

This result was certainly surprising, because Einstein's theory of relativity - a theory which has been confirmed over and over again - places a speed limit on the universe, and that limit is the speed of light. As I've explained before, the equations of relativity indicate that it's impossible to accelerate to the speed of light. And if you take a speed that's greater than the speed of light and plug it into the equations, the results give you nonsensical answers, like imaginary energy! (An imaginary number is when you take a square root of a negative number.)

In other words, if the speed of light can be broken, then one of the fundamental principles that we thought we understood about the universe is clearly incomplete or invalid.

It's a very exciting time for physicists!

Skepticism Abounds

However, physicists are appropriately skeptical about such a claim. To overturn a century of consistent experimental evidence in support of the theory, it'll take more than just one anomalous result. That's how things work in science, after all. A theory is in place, confirmed by evidence, but there can be a gradual accumulation of data that refutes the theory. Scientists then have to revise or refine the theory in order to explain the new data. This is exactly how Albert Einstein originally developed his theory of relativity, in fact, to resolve holes in the previous theories of gravitation and electrodynamics.

Experimentalists have examined the results to see if they could find a flaw in the experiment, to show that these results are incorrect. Meanwhile, theorists have been trying to figure how they could explain the result if it turns out to be true. So far, there's been little success, because each proposed explanation runs into various problems by contradicting other known properties of the universe.

Refining the Test

The experiment works because a bunch of neutrinos created at CERN travel 730 kilometers to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy. These neutrinos are created by collisions back at CERN, so one of the possible sources of error could be that the physicists don't exactly know which neutrino came from which collision. There are statistical methods that physicists use in these cases, and they're generally considered accurate enough, but in this case it is one point of "fuzziness" that may have resulted in the unusual results.

Physicists like to tackle these challenges head on, though, so they worked to eliminate the fuzziness. Instead of having a more continuous collision (and thus a more continuous beam of neutrinos), they broke the beam up into short, 3-nanosecond pulses. Each tiny pulse underwent a collision, and then the neutrinos traveled to the Italian detector.

The results were consistent with the earlier findings - the neutrinos arrived approximately 60 nanoseconds before they should have been able to. The neutrinos still seem to be moving faster than the speed of light.

However, one problem of this new approach is that they got a lot fewer results. They were only able to conduct this test about 20 times. Further tests will need to be run, both at CERN and in other laboratories. If this is a result which only shows up in the OPERA experiment, there will continue to be the possibility that it's some sort of equipment issue rather than an actual violation of a basic law of physics. Confirming results carried out somewhere else would make this claim a lot more solid and go a long way toward convincing the physics community that it's correct.

If the experimentalists are able to replicate the results, then the race will really be on for the theoretical physicists to come up with an explanation that works.

Related Articles:


View the original article here