Last Nail in the Coffin for Superluminal Neutrinos

The ICARUS Experiment, operating at the same Gran Sasso location as the OPERA Experiment, has conducted its own measurement of the speed of neutrinos from CERN, and the results are consistent with the neutrino velocity between constrained by the speed of light. (Since neutrinos are known to have a slight mass, they would actually travel slightly below lightspeed, but the difference is small enough to be buried in the noise of the results.)

Read it and weep:

From the ICARUS paper.

It doesn’t end there. Other teams, including BOREXINO, LVD, and OPERA (now that they have identified possible sources of systemic error) will also be performing measurements. But it is looking like the “Ghost of OPERA” doesn’t have a ghost of a chance. So long ftl neutrinos.

• arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1203/1203.3433.pdf
• CERN Press Release
• This Time, ICARUS Really DOES Refute OPERA | Of Particular Significance
• Superluminal Neutrinos are so 2011 | Cosmic Variance | Discover Magazine
• ICARUS Refutes Opera’s Superluminal Neutrinos – AGAIN!
• Neutrinos not faster than light : Nature News & Comment
• symmetry breaking » Blog Archive » New neutrino measurement finds particles obeying speed limit
• Not So Fast: More Evidence Neutrinos Aren’t Defying Einstein | Wired Science | Wired.com
• Not So Fast: Independent Measurement Shows Neutrinos Don’t Exceed Speed of Light | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network
• The Fat Lady Sings for OPERA : Starts With A Bang
• Neutrinos, Wishful Thinking, and the Sloth of Science « Galileo’s Pendulum
• Neutrinos in the News : Uncertain Principles

My previous articles on this topic:

• Putting the OPERA Affair in Perspective | Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot?
• Not a Big Shocker | Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot?
• ICARUS Nixes OPERA’s Superluminal Neutrino Result | Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot?
• OPERA Redux | Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot?
• FTL Neutrinos? Not so fast…. | Whiskey…Tango…Foxtrot?

Update: (April 2, 2012)

The Fat Lady has sung for FTL neutrinos. Matt Strassler has posted an excellent post-mortem of the situation based upon the limited available information.

Final Update (for reals, this time): June 8, 2012

At the Neutrino 2012 conference in Kyoto, it has been announced that all four major neutrino experiments at the Gran Sasso facility (OPERA, LVD, ICARUS, and Borexino) have performed new neutrino speed measurements and have found no evidence of superluminal neutrinos. Special Relativity still stands. Matt Strassler has a brief writeup on it here. These results are consistent with neutrino speed measurements also reported at the conference by the MINOS experiment.