quarta-feira, 28 de setembro de 2011

Mais rápido que a luz?!

 Detecção de neutrinos.
Em um experimento recentemente divulgado, alguns cientistas afirmam que os neutrinos podem viajar (um pouco) mais rápido que a luz! Segundo a Teoria da Relatividade de Einstein isso é totalmente impossível! Das duas uma: ou existe algum tipo de erro de medição ou a teoria de Einstein está errada (ou incompleta)!

O leitor interessado pode consultar o artigo "Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the OPERA detector in the CNGS beam" - link: static.arxiv.org - artigo em pdf. Abstract:

The OPERA neutrino experiment at the underground Gran Sasso Laboratory has measured the velocity of neutrinos from the CERN CNGS beam over a baseline of about 730 km with much higher accuracy than  previous studies conducted with accelerator neutrinos. The measurement is based on highstatistics data taken by OPERA in the years 2009, 2010 and 2011. Dedicated upgrades of the CNGS timing system and of the OPERA detector, as well as a high precision geodesy campaign for the measurement of the neutrino baseline, allowed reaching comparable systematic and statistical accuracies. An early arrival time of CNGS muon neutrinos with respect to the one computed assuming the speed of light in vacuum of (60.7 ± 6.9 (stat.) ± 7.4 (sys.)) ns was measured. This anomaly corresponds to a relative difference of the muon neutrino velocity with respect to the speed of light (v-c)/c = (2.48 ± 0.28 (stat.) ± 0.30 (sys.)) ×10-5.