Wednesday 28 March 2012 

Speaker: Marcos Dracos (Universite de Strasbourg)

Title: "Observation of Super-Luminal Neutrinos with the OPERA Experiment"

Abstract:

The OPERA experiment is an international collaboration consisting
of 36 institutes and over 160 researchers. The main aim of OPERA
is to detect the appearance of tau neutrinos in a muon neutrino beam.
The neutrino beam produced at CERN has been fully operational since 2008.
A first candidate nu_tau event was reported in 2010. In addition to its
primary task for studies of neutrino oscillations, OPERA, taking advantage
of the relatively large distance between the emission and the interaction
point (~ 730 km), measured the muon neutrino velocity with an accuracy never
reached so far. This result announced last September, shows that the neutrinos
arrive in Gran Sasso underground laboratory (Italy) earlier by 60 ns compared
to the time needed if travelling with the speed of light in vacuum. The experiment
has so far refused to give any physical interpretation of this phenomenon and
looks forward to confirmation of this result by an independent experiment.