A few days ago scientists announced the results of a second experiment carried out between the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron and the National Laboratories of Gran Sasso which confirmed the detection of neutrino beams that traveled faster than light occurred for the first time two months ago. Now another team of CERN scientists working at the ICARUS (Imaging Cosmic And Rare Underground Signals) experiment raised precise doubts about these results.

The reason why the ICARUS project scientists believe that the neutrinos haven’t traveled faster than light between the two laboratories is related to the energy released by them, or better not released. In fact, according to those scientists if neutrinos had traveled faster than light they would have lost energy producing photons and electron / positron pairs in a process analogous to Cherenkov radiation. In that case the instruments should have detected these particles but they didn’t.

ICARUS scientists use the same equipment as the OPERA experiment to create neutrino beams so they could compare the data of an experiment they carried out in 2010 with those from the experiments that made such a stir this year. What they discovered is that the spectrum of neutrinos beams energy recorded in the OPERA experiment is consistent with particles traveling at the speed of light and no more.

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In other words there seems to be a contradiction between the velocities and energies measured during the OPERA experiment. There was already skepticism about these results and the scientists who conducted the experiments announced them with great caution without speculations. Now more than ever we must wait for further data analysis and further experiments, especially if carried out in different places with different equipment, to see what results come out.

In such cases it’s possible that very soon they’ll announce that they found an error in the OPERA experiment or we’ll have to wait until next year to have the results of the next similar experiments already announced. For the moment we remain more than ever in doubt that there’s some problem in the use of what on the other hand are incredibly sophisticated pieces of equipment.