OPERA Encore

Hey, did you like my play on words? Cute, no? Oh well, I can always try....

It seems that CERN has started sending beams with different pulse time structure to OPERA during the past few days. This will enable OPERA to "redo" their infamous experiment and allows them to double check a number of things to either shore up their results, or to find possible sources of errors and uncertainties in their earlier measurements.

Dr Bertolucci, the director of research at Cern, told BBC News: "In the last few days we have started to send a different time structure of the beam to Gran Sasso.

"This will allow Opera to repeat the measurement, removing some of the possible systematics."

This is one of a crucial "assumption" of the experiment, that the neutrino pulse structure is the same as the proton pulse structure. Without a near detector (which is available for MINOS), they have to assume that the same pulse structure as the proton beam propagates all the way to Gran Sasso. It would be interesting to see if a different proton beam will show itself in the neutrino pulse.

It shouldn't take very long before we get initial results out of this one, one would think. It might even be ahead of all the other tests being done at MINOS and T2K.

Zz.