FTL Neutrinos - a thing of the past?

Faster Than Light (FTL) Neutrinos detected by the OPERA team at CERN, last fall, might just be an experimental error. New measurements from a different team at CERN, called ICARUS, clearly show that neutrinos do not travel faster than the speed of light. This result comes three weeks after a statement released by CERN that the OPERA team has identified two potential errors in their measurement of speed of neutrinos. Detractors of the theory of FTL neutrinos are convinced that this result from the ICARUS teams is the final nail in the coffin for FTL neutrinos.

The ICARUS team had already disproved the theory of FTL neutrinos, last November, when they tested the prediction made by theorists Sheldon Glashow and Andrew Cohen regarding FTL neutrinos. Their prediction was that if neutrinos travel faster than the speed of light, all the high energy neutrinos must decay during their flight and the detector would not detect any high energy neutrinos. But the ICARUS team was able to detect high energy neutrinos in their experiments. This result is an indirect argument against the theory of FTL neutrinos.

Now, the ICARUS team has directly measured the speed of neutrinos and their result shows that neutrinos travel almost at the speed of light. This is consistent with all the neutrino experiments conducted before, except for the OPERA result. The ICARUS team also used a more sensitive timing device to measure the speed of neutrinos.

Here is a link to Sean Carroll's article on FTL neutrinos where he discusses the ICARUS team's paper with the result.

Here is CERN's press release about the result.

To me, this measurement is convincing enough to forget the OPERA team's result and concentrate on the search of Higgs boson. But if one is an optimist and a supporter of FTL neutrinos, one can argue that there is still a 50% percent chance that neutrinos do travel faster than the speed of light and we cannot come to a conclusion till the OPERA team performs the experiment again, later this year.