Costella has also proposed possible explanations of the data. See 1 and 2. These proposals focus on the idea of a short-lived tachyon. This sort of explanation helps explain the SN 1987a data. Costella points out that if the muon-neutrino pair is becoming tachyonic through the initial hadron barrier at the end of the accelerator that this would explain the data very well. The barrier has a distance of 18.2 meters which is very close to the claimed discrepancy. Costella proposes that they become tachyonic due to natural behavior of the Higgs field and I don’t have anywhere near the expertise to evaluate how reasonable that is, although he points out potential empirical problems with this hypothesis. Note that this hypothesis seems to be one of the easiest of the new physics hypotheses to test since one just makes the barrier longer and see if the neutrinos arrive sooner.
Overall, interesting and surprisingly plausible, but I’m still betting on some form of error.
Relevant updates:
John Costella has a fairly simple statistical analysis which strongly suggests that the the OPERA data is statistically significant (pdf). This of course doesn’t rule out systematic problems with the experiment which still seem to be the most likely.
Costella has also proposed possible explanations of the data. See 1 and 2. These proposals focus on the idea of a short-lived tachyon. This sort of explanation helps explain the SN 1987a data. Costella points out that if the muon-neutrino pair is becoming tachyonic through the initial hadron barrier at the end of the accelerator that this would explain the data very well. The barrier has a distance of 18.2 meters which is very close to the claimed discrepancy. Costella proposes that they become tachyonic due to natural behavior of the Higgs field and I don’t have anywhere near the expertise to evaluate how reasonable that is, although he points out potential empirical problems with this hypothesis. Note that this hypothesis seems to be one of the easiest of the new physics hypotheses to test since one just makes the barrier longer and see if the neutrinos arrive sooner.
Overall, interesting and surprisingly plausible, but I’m still betting on some form of error.