![neutrinos faster than light neutrinos faster than light](https://scitechdaily.com/images/faster-than-light-neutrinos-180x101.jpg)
The authors have tried to think of everything, but it's not clear that they can. Then there are the classic unknown unknowns. Small errors in each of these could add up to something more significant than their total error. There are a lot of potential sources of error they know about-the paper's table lists a dozen of them. The team has recorded over 16,000 events now, and the profile of events over time very closely matches the structure of the proton bunches that created them.īut that doesn't mean that this presentation is the last word on the topic. The difference between their speed and that of light is very statistically significant, and the neutrino data itself looks excellent. All of the errors, when added up, shouldn't be able to account for anything close to the 60ns gap between the neutrinos' arrival and the speed of light. The end result is that the OPERA team doesn't see any obvious problems in its measurements. They also compensated for the timing of the kicker magnet that pushes the bunch out of the accelerator and added detectors that registered them passing through the hardware to get a clearer sense of their timing. The timing of the protons and structure of the two bunches of them used in these experiments is not even, either, so the researchers created a profile of the proton bunch.
![neutrinos faster than light neutrinos faster than light](http://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/the_first_t2k_neutrino_event-4f072d5-listing.jpg)
The protons move close to, but not at the speed of light, as do the unstable pions both of these effects were accounted for. The protons hit a fixed target and produce unstable particles that decay, releasing a neutrino. Neutrinos are produced using a proton beam from one of the accelerators that feeds them into the LHC. The vast majority of both the paper and the lecture were dedicated to discussing how these errors were reduced (the actual detection of the neutrinos was only a small portion of the paper). As a spokesperson for the MINOS neutrino experiment told Ars yesterday, there are three potential sources of error in the timing measurements: distance errors, time-of-flight errors, and errors in the timing of neutrino production.