Breaking the universal speed

limit
By Stephen Ornes / October 12, 2011

The yellow line shows the path of a 17-mile-long circular tunnel near Geneva, Switzerland, used
to speed up tiny particles for a large scientific project called CERN. Neutrinos generated at
CERN traveled through the earth to a detector in Italy and were clocked going faster than the
speed of light. Credit: Maximilien Brice/CERN

Once upon a time, the brilliant physicist Albert Einstein

argued that the universe has a speed limit. The year was
1905, and the speed limit was the speed of light. He argued
that no particles, people or spaceships can ever travel faster
than light, be it the beam from a flashlight or the blazing
explosion of a supernova. Ever since then, light has been
viewed as the fastest way to get across the universe.

Until now. Maybe.

A tiny particle called a neutrino might be breaking the limit.

That news comes from a laboratory deep under a mountain
in Italy. There, as part of an experiment called OPERA,
scientists say they timed neutrinos going a little faster than
the speed of light. In this case, a little is enough to excite
researchers around the world.

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“This will be a tremendous revolutionary finding if it is true,”
Chang Kee Jung told Science News. Jung is a physicist at
Stony Brook University in New York who studies neutrinos.
Physicists study energy and matter to learn more about
natural laws that govern the universe. He, like other
researchers, is fired up about the discovery but thinks it’s
too good to be true. He suspects scientists will find a
mistake eventually.

But the mistake hasn’t appeared yet.

The difference in speeds is tiny. If one of these zippy

neutrinos raced a light beam to the moon and back a million
times, the neutrino would win by about a minute. But even a
little bit counts: If Einstein was wrong about the speed of
light being the fastest speed in the universe, then other
parts of his theories about time, matter and energy also
might not hold up.

If other researchers can confirm the neutrinos’ speeds, “this

may mean that there’s much more going on in particle
physics than we thought possible,” Matthew Mewes told
Science News. Mewes is a theoretical physicist at
Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. Theoretical physicists
try to understand and predict behaviors of matter and
energy that have not necessarily been observed.

This isn’t the first time neutrinos have been suspected of

breaking the law. In 2007, scientists thought they caught
neutrinos speeding between the Fermi National Accelerator
Laboratory near Chicago and a lab in a mine in Minnesota.
That experiment was exciting, but it wasn’t precise enough
to convince the scientific community. The results could have
been explained with neutrinos traveling slower than light.

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Scientists say neutrinos fired from Switzerland traveled to this underground laboratory in Italy
faster than the speed of light. Credit: Francesco Arneodo LNGS-INFN

In the recent experiment, the neutrinos started their journey

at CERN, a giant laboratory with experiments designed to
study the smallest particles. CERN is near Geneva, on the
border between Switzerland and France. Machines at CERN
fired a stream of protons at a chunk of graphite, the same
material found in pencil lead, which caused a stream of
neutrinos to pour out.

Neutrinos can travel through almost any material without

slowing down or stopping because they’re loners by nature
that barely interact with anything else. (They’re also
everywhere. Billions of neutrinos just zoomed through you.
And billions more.) The neutrinos from CERN traveled under
the Alps and halfway down the boot of Italy before being
detected at the Gran Sasso National Laboratory, home to the
OPERA experiment.

Now, teams of researchers around the world are scrambling

to time neutrinos in other detectors. Scientists won’t believe
neutrinos are faster than light until someone else can do a
similar experiment and get the same results. Which may not
happen.

“This is a serious experiment, and these are serious people,”

theoretical physicist Lee Smolin told Science News. Smolin
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works at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in
Waterloo, Canada. “At this point nobody sober would be
willing to say that this is right.”

POWER WORDS (adapted from the New Oxford American

Dictionary)

neutrino A fast particle with almost no mass that rarely

reacts with normal matter. Three kinds of neutrinos are
known.

particle A tiny portion of matter.

physics The study of energy, matter and the relationship

between the two.

matter Something which occupies space and has mass.

Anything with matter will weigh something on Earth.

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Earth from the inside out
By Stephen Ornes / January 28, 2009

Originally used to detect elusive particles from space called

neutrinos, the four-story detector at the Sudbury Neutrino
Observatory could be retrofitted to detect antinutrinos produced
by natural radioactivity inside Earth.

Courtesy of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

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Scientists have long known this strange fact: It’s easier to
look deep into space than into the center of Earth. Light can
pass through most of space, so the light from distant stars
can easily be seen with the naked eye. But Earth is opaque,
which means that light cannot pass through it.

If light cannot pass through it, then we cannot see what’s on

the inside of our planet. So if we can’t use light to see inside
our own planet, what can we use?

Recently, some scientists have been trying to use neutrinos

— tiny particles smaller than an atom that zip through space.
Neutrinos come from the sun or other distant stars, and
astronomers have studied them for years. Now, a team of
geoscientists — “geo” means Earth — think a kind of
neutrino may have something to say about the Earth, too.

Not all neutrinos come from outer space. Special neutrinos

called geoneutrinos are generated from within the Earth.
(Remember that “geo” means Earth.) Most of these local
neutrinos come from either the crust or the mantle. The
crust is Earth’s outermost shell, what we stand on, and the
mantle is five to 25 miles below the crust. Certain elements
within the Earth can send off geoneutrinos when undergoing
a process called radioactive decay.

During radioactive decay, a material loses some of its

energy by sending out particles and radiation. An element
that goes through this process is said to be radioactive, and
radioactive elements occur naturally in the Earth. Some
radioactive elements produce geoneutrinos.

After they are produced, geoneutrinos pass straight through

the solid Earth without being absorbed or bouncing around.
If they’re not stopped, they go straight into outer space —
and keep going, and going and going. Geoscientists hope to
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catch a few of these particles on their way out, but it’s not
going to be easy.

There are two big problems: There aren’t that many

geoneutrinos, and they’re hard to find. To catch these elusive
particles, scientists have designed special geoneutrino
detectors. These strange-looking scientific instruments are
giant, metal spheres buried deep underground.

In an abandoned mine in Canada, for example, scientists are

preparing a geoneutrino detector that is four stories tall and
more than a mile underground. The detector will be filled
with a special liquid that flashes when a geoneutrino passes
through. The liquid “produces a lot of light, and it’s very
transparent,” says Mark Chen, the director of the project.
When it’s up and running, probably in 2010, the detector will
find only about 50 geoneutrinos per year. Other detectors are
being planned all over Earth — one of them is even supposed
to sit on the bottom of the ocean!

The geoscientists who study geoneutrinos hope that the

particles will help answer an old question about the Earth.
The interior of the Earth is blistering hot, but where does the
heat come from? They know that part of the heat — maybe
as much as 60 percent — comes from radioactive decay, but
researchers want to know for sure. By measuring
geoneutrinos, scientists hope to figure out how radioactive
decay helps heat Earth.

IceCube science
By Stephen Ornes / September 8, 2008

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 The South Pole has the most extreme weather
conditions on Earth, but some scientists think it’s
the best place to watch for neutrinos.

Francis Halzen/NSF

Francis Halzen has an unusual job. This scientist studies itsy

bitsy, teeny tiny objects zipping through the universe.
They’re called neutrinos.

His job should be easy because neutrinos are all around us,
all the time. They pass from the depths of outer space to the
depths of your sock drawer — and then just keep going. And
don’t even think about trying to count these super-tiny
particles. The neutrinos flying around our universe
outnumber all of the people, animals, plants, satellites,
planets, stars, galaxies, black holes and asteroids combined.

They’re also fast, traveling at almost the speed of light. In

the time it took you to read the previous paragraph, more
than a trillion neutrinos zoomed through you.

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They always travel in straight lines. Some fly from your eyes
to your ears, others from your feet to your head. They fly
from the left, from the right and from everywhere in
between. Although you can’t see them, they’re also flying
through everything you can see.

So you would think Halzen’s job at the University of

Wisconsin-Madison should be a snap. All he has to do is
catch a few of the gazillions passing through his university
every day.

But they are so small and fast that they can fly through
almost anything without leaving a trace. Not even photons,
the “particles” that carry light, can do that. Neutrinos are so
amazingly hard to see that some scientists have taken to
calling them “ghost particles.”

“Neutrinos are one of the most common particles in the

universe, but in some ways one of the hardest to capture,”
says Jim Madsen of the University of Wisconsin-River Falls.
Like Halzen, he looks for neutrinos.

Even Wolfgang Pauli, the first scientist to think of neutrinos,

had his doubts. He reportedly wrote in a letter, “I have done
a terrible thing. I have invented a particle that cannot be
detected.”

Since Pauli’s time, scientists have found ways to build

neutrino detectors and search for the strange particle.
Halzen is in on the hunt. He is leading a team of scientists
building a neutrino detector at the bottom of the world, not
far from the South Pole. The machine, called IceCube, is
about half done.

When complete, IceCube will be the largest scientific

instrument in the world, the size of about 1,000 Empire State

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Buildings. Isn’t it strange that to find the smallest thing,
scientists will have to use the biggest machine?

Why bother looking for neutrinos? These tiny particles can

tell us about black holes and exploding stars. Scientists at
the South Pole believe IceCube might also pull back the
curtain on outer space, revealing strange new things that we
can’t yet even imagine.

Tiny ghosts from outer space

Neutrinos travel in straight lines, passing right through

almost every kind of matter without changing direction. That
means “we can use these particles to bring us information
from regions of space that other things can’t,” explains Doug
Cowen, an IceCube scientist at Pennsylvania State
University in University Park.

Take the area around black holes, for example. Believed to

exist at the core of most galaxies, black holes are ultra-
compact objects with a mass millions to billions of times
that of our sun. They’re difficult to study because they
absorb most kinds of radiation, including visible light. If light
from a black hole doesn’t get to Earth, then we can’t “see” it.

Scientists suspect that when supermassive black holes

“eat” some nearby matter, powerful jets of energy escape
into space. The jets can quickly create a stream of high-
energy neutrinos, which travel in an everlasting straight
beam through space. Other particles might also escape a
black hole, but they can be quickly absorbed by dust or
deflected by electromagnetic fields.
When an instrument like IceCube detects high-energy neutrinos, scientists can trace the straight line
backwards to pinpoint its parent black hole. The neutrinos’ path through the detector will serve, like an
arrow, to point at the black hole. Once astronomers know where to look, they can then use other
instruments to study the black hole.

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 When a star explodes in a supernova, it ejects
neutrinos that travel through space at nearly the
speed of light. Scientists try to analyze the
neutrinos when they pass through the Earth.

NASA

Scientists can use the same technique to find exploding

stars. The most common type of neutrino forms within the
cores of stars like our sun. When the star “dies,” it can
explode into a bright ball called a supernova. Like black
holes, supernovas are difficult to observe. The sky is big and
only two or three supernovas may occur in our galaxy every
century. What’s more, their explosions may last only a few
seconds. But like black holes, supernovas eject streams of
neutrinos, which can serve as a sort of energy “fingerprint”
by which the supernova can be traced.

Neutrinos from supernovas, however, have much less energy

than those spewed by black holes. That’s one way scientists
can tell them apart.

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In 1987, astronomers found a nearby supernova. The stream
of neutrinos it had emitted were detected all around Earth.
Those neutrinos arrived at the Earth a few hours before light
from the supernova did, apparently because the neutrinos
weren’t slowed down through interactions with dust and
other matter along the way. So neutrinos can provide a first
alert for astronomers, suggesting where they should point
their telescopes to catch major upcoming events.

Scientists working on IceCube hope their machine will also

solve one of the biggest mysteries in outer space. “Cosmic
rays” are powerful streams of radiation that blow through
the universe. Many scientists suspect that they’re leftover
radiation from old supernovas. To find out, they hope to find
neutrinos from these old explosions and match them to the
cosmic rays.

“We expect to detect neutrinos from these sources.” Doing

so would provide not only the first solid evidence but indeed
“the smoking gun for that theory,” Halzen says.

While scientists are excited about looking for such things,

they’re even more excited at the idea of stumbling onto
unexpected deep-space surprises with IceCube.

“To me the really fascinating thing would be to discover

something that hasn’t been seen with any other technique,”
Madsen says. He likens that to the excitement experienced
when people peered through the first microscopes.

Looking for a faint blue light

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 IceCube is made up of a grid of sensors that can
detect the blue light from a collision between a
neutrino and an atom.

NSF

Neutrinos are one type of subatomic particle (see “The

Particle Zoo”). The name means “little neutral one.” They’re
described as neutral because they don’t have a positive or a
negative electric charge.

Finding neutrinos is tricky, but not impossible. Most pass

through matter without running into anything. Occasionally,
however, a neutrino smashes into an atom. This collision
produces an unusual phenomenon: a flash of eerie blue light.
This glow is called Cerenkov (chair ENK uf) radiation.

Instead of trying to stop neutrinos, which is almost

impossible, scientists scout for this blue light. Although
faint, it can travel dozens of meters (hundreds of feet)
through water or ice if the conditions are right. Because
Cerenkov radiation is so faint, however, neutrino detectors
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must be shielded from other types of light and energy that
might mask the blue light.
To screen other light out, scientists have taken their neutrino quest underground, because Earth acts like
a giant filter. Earth or its atmosphere absorbs most particles that zip through the universe towards our
planet. Only tiny particles like neutrinos can easily pass through. IceCube’s position at the South Pole
means it can find neutrinos that entered Earth in the north and traveled all of the way through our
planet.

Technicians at the Super-Kamiokande neutrino detector have to

take a boat to repair one of its thousands of light sensors.

Kamioka Observatory, ICRR (Institute for Cosmic Ray

Research), University of Tokyo

An older neutrino spotter lies beneath a mountain in Japan.

Its giant, spherical tank holds about 50 million liters (13
million gallons) of water, enough to fill 20 Olympic-size
swimming pools. The inside of the tank is lined with
thousands of beach-ball–sized detectors that can pick up
even the faintest flash of blue light.

Many neutrino-scouting devices look like the one in Japan:

large tanks, deep underground. Some contain regular water,
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others a type enriched with a heavy form of hydrogen
(known as deuterium). Until last year, scientists used such a
tank, located in Canada. At an abandoned gold mine in South
Dakota, scientists are building a similar underground
neutrino-scouting system. And on the floor of the
Mediterranean Sea, European scientists are installing an
underwater neutrino detector with sensors that float on long
strings.
Although all of the tank-based systems are remote, they can be seen. But if you go to the South Pole to
visit IceCube, prepare to be disappointed. Scientists are burying this detector more than a mile beneath
the snowy surface. If you were standing on top of it, you’d never know it. There are a few buildings
around and a landing strip for an airplane, but those are the only clues.

You’d never guess that buried beneath the snow and ice is the
world’s largest scientific instrument.

NSF

That’s not the only thing that sets IceCube apart from other
neutrino detectors. At nearly all of the others, the telltale
blue neutrino fingerprint is identified as it passes through
water. At IceCube, Francis Halzen and his team are taking a
different approach. They’re building IceCube inside an
enormous glacier.

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First, the scientists drill a deep hole in the ice with hot
water. Next, they lower into this hole a string of about 60
detectors, each the size of a beach ball. As ice refreezes
around the string, the detectors are locked into place,
waiting for a neutrino to whiz by.

Here, ice takes the place of the water in more conventional

detectors. When a passing neutrino collides with some atom,
its faint blue light begins speeding through the frozen
glacier. Light detectors, frozen in place, chart the path of
this small flash. By analyzing which detectors saw the light,
scientists can track the neutrino’s path, which will point
straight back at its source.

“This ice is fantastically clear,” says Halzen. “In our detector

the blue light travels over 100 meters [328 feet].”

Burying IceCube this way requires a lot of work, but Halzen

says the science it will deliver is worth the effort. For
scientists like Halzen, Madsen and Cowen, that small, faint
flash could bring big discoveries about the farthest reaches
of outer space.

“It’s almost a certainty that we will see things no one has

expected before,” Cowen says. “We are more or less opening
up this window on the universe and seeing what flies in.”

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