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IN RETROSPECT

OPERA’s tau neutrinos

Nature Reviews Physics volume 3, page 679 (2021)Cite this article

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In September 2011, an announcement shocked the physics community: neutrinos apparently travelling faster than the speed of light had been spotted by the OPERA (Oscillation Project with Emulsion-tRacking Apparatus) experiment at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy. This outrageous behaviour of neutrinos turned out to be the result of a technical glitch, but unfortunately OPERA remains better known for this incident rather than its scientific legacy.

The analysis of the data taken between 2008 and 2012 involved the developing of about 300,000 nuclear emulsion films and their painstaking scanning with microscopes to identify neutrino events by reconstructing the particle trajectories recorded on film. Five candidate tau events were identified, which gave a 5σ confidence in the observation of the muon-to-tau neutrino oscillations reported in 2015, the same year the discovery of the more general phenomenon of neutrino oscillations was recognized by the Nobel prize in physics. A reanalysis using multivariate analysis techniques identified 10 candidate events and was published in 2018.

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References

Original article

  • Agafonova, N. et al. Final results of the OPERA experiment on ντ appearance in the CNGS neutrino beam. Phys. Rev. Lett. 120, 211801 (2018)

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Related article

  • Agafonova, N. et al. Discovery of τ neutrino appearance in the CNGS neutrino beam with the OPERA experiment. Phys. Rev. Lett. 115, 121802 (2015)

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  1. Nature Reviews Physics https://www.nature.com/natrevphys/

    Iulia Georgescu

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  1. Iulia Georgescu
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Correspondence to Iulia Georgescu.

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Georgescu, I. OPERA’s tau neutrinos. Nat Rev Phys 3, 679 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42254-021-00372-9

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