Geneva, Mar 17: European researchers said on Friday they have measured the speed of neutrinos and found the subatomic particles don't travel faster than light after all, refuting another team's measurements that prompted widespread disbelief among scientists last year.
Scientists with the rival OPERA experiment said in September that their tests appeared to show neutrinos speeding faster than light, a feat that goes against Albert Einstein's special theory of relativity which underlies much of modern physics.
Nobel Prize winning physicist Carlo Rubbia said his team, called ICARUS, used a similar experiment to trap neutrinos fired from the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, or CERN, in Switzerland to a detector hundreds of kilometres away in Italy.
“It's a perfectly straightforward experiment, very clean,” Rubbia told The Associated Press in a telephone interview. “The results are very convincing, and they tell us essentially that there was something not quite right with the results of OPERA.”
Doubts about the OPERA results were heightened last month when it was announced that researchers had found a flaw in the technical setup that could have distorted the experiment's figures.
Antonio Ereditato, a member of the OPERA team and the head of the Albert Einstein Centre for Fundamental Physics in Bern, Switzerland, said he welcomed the latest results. (AP)
