Measurement of the neutrino velocity with the ICARUS detector at the CNGS beam

Abstract

At the end of the 2011 run, the CERN CNGS neutrino beam has been briefly operated in lower intensity mode with similar to 10(12) p.o.t/pulse and with a proton beam structure made of four LHC-like extractions, each with a narrow width of similar to 3 ns, separated by 524 ns. This very tightly bunched beam allowed a very accurate time-of-flight measurement of neutrinos from CERN to LNGS on an event-by-event basis. The ICARUS T600 detector (CNGS2) has collected 7 beam-associated events, consistent with the CNGS collected neutrino flux of 2.2 x 10(16) p.o.t. and in agreement with the well-known characteristics of neutrino events in the LAr-TPC. The time of flight difference between the speed of light and the arriving neutrino LAr-TPC events has been analysed. The result delta t = 0.3 +/- 4.9(stat.) +/- 9.0(syst.) ns is compatible with the simultaneous arrival of all events with speed equal to that of light. This is in a striking difference with the reported result of OPERA (OPERA Collaboration, 2011) [1] claiming that high energy neutrinos from CERN arrive at LNGS similar to 60 ns earlier than expected from luminal speed. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved

Constraints from orbital motions around the Earth of the environmental fifth-force hypothesis for the OPERA superluminal neutrino phenomenology

“…[75,76,77,78,79], as a function of λ for 10 R e ≤ λ ≤ 100 R e . bound of |α| ≤ 5 × 10 −11 (λ = 60 R e ) by 9 Müller et al [78,79]. However, the constraints of Figure 3 are orders of magnitude better than those reported in [57,55,39] for λ = 60R e .…”

“…We used the Satellite Laser Ranging data of the artificial satellite LAGEOS II to put 9 Müller et al [78,79] actually included a Yukawa-type fifth force in the mathematical force models with which they analyzed the LLR data.…”

“…They are depicted in Figure 2. For λ = 1 − 1.5 R e , it is M * /M P 1.4 − 1.6 × 10 10 , while for λ = 10 R e we have M * /M P 4−5×10 9 . Such results are in striking contrast with M * ∼ 10 −6 M P inferred by Dvali and Vikman [17] for λ = 1 R e .…”

“…(4) might be due to a systematic error of instrumental origin, so that ξ would now be statistically compatible with zero within the error bar. Recently, a time-of-flight measurement of neutrinos from CERN to LNGS performed by the ICARUS collaboration [9] did not confirm the OPERA result by reporting δt = 0.3 ± 4.0| stat ± 9.0| syst ns ∼ 0.3 ± 10 ns,…”

Testing Lorentz and CPT Invariance with Neutrinos

“…The expression for the neutrino velocity (6) can be directly applied to this type of study in beam experiments [31][32][33][34][35][36][37]. Notice that for operators of dimension d = 3 there is no modification to the neutrino velocity, whereas for d = 4 this modification is independent of the energy E ≈ |p p p|.…”