Read more: "Neutrinos: Complete guide to the ghostly particle"
The supposedly super-speedy neutrinos may have slowed to light-speed, but they haven't stopped creating turmoil in the physics world. Two leaders of the OPERA experiment behind the controversial result stepped down this week.
Spokesperson Antonio Ereditato of the University of Bern in Switzerland turned in his resignation on 29 March, and physics coordinator Dario Autiero of the Institute of Nuclear Physics in Lyon, France, resigned on 30 March. Both cited tensions within the collaboration as the reason for their departures.
In September, the OPERA collaboration reported that they had measured neutrinos making the 730-kilometre trip from CERN in Switzerland to the Gran Sasso underground laboratory in Italy 60 nanoseconds faster than if they had been travelling at light speed.
If it panned out, the result would have turned much of modern physics on its head, contradicting Einstein's theory of special relativity and opening the theoretical door to exotic possibilities like extra dimensions and time travel.
The result, however, seems to be down to experimental error. OPERA announced last month that they had found a malfunctioning clock and a leaky fibre-optic cable that could explain part or all of the neutrinos' extra speed. And another experiment in the same underground cavern in Italy, ICARUS, re-did the same measurement and saw no deviation from the speed of light.
"We don't think anymore that the neutrinos were superluminal," says OPERA team member Luca Stanco of Italy's National Physics Institute.
Two camps
Because of the high stakes, some members of the 170-person OPERA collaboration thought the team should have kept the result under wraps longer as they worked through possible sources of error. Others disagreed, arguing that announcing the result would allow it to be studied by other groups.
"We received a lot of criticism" about announcing the result, says Stanco. "I was part of this criticism." Stanco did not sign the first draft of the scientific manuscript reporting the measurement because he thought it was too preliminary.
The conflicts continued, and on 28 March, the OPERA collaboration held a vote on whether or not to continue supporting Ereditato as the head and public face of the collaboration. The vote took place at a workshop where the various experiments conducted at the Gran Sasso lab presented and discussed their findings.
The vote of no-confidence needed two-thirds of the votes to pass, and only got about 55 per cent, Stanco says. But a day later, Ereditato decided to resign on his own.
Too distracting
"In my role as project coordinator, I have done everything within my power to dissipate the tensions within the project," Ereditato wrote in a public statement in Le Scienze, the Italian edition of Scientific American. "However, when it became clear to me that tensions had gone beyond a critical threshold and turned into open criticism, I felt that the time had come for me to tender my resignation in order to foster a new, more widely-shared consensus. The only thing I wish to specify is that this move should not be perceived as weakness or flight in the face of difficulty."
Too much internal strife could distract from the "scientific objectives and the formidable challenges of a leading-edge experiment", he wrote. "This is a risk too great to run. To avert it, the position of individuals must take a back seat."
On Friday, Autiero stepped down as well, saying the neutrino result had fanned the flames of an already fraught working environment. "These kinds of tensions always existed in the collaboration, for at least 10 years," Autiero says. "I was not able to ensure the efficiency of my role, so this is why I resigned."
Autiero says announcing the neutrino result when they did was unavoidable. "It was impossible at a certain point to hide it outside," Autiero says. "People were leaking the information" on blogs before the public seminar where Autiero discussed the measurement.
Err on the side of caution
And Ereditato argues that letting the scientific community weigh in on results is the way science is done. "Even when they are particularly unexpected or 'uncomfortable', findings must be made public, entailing scrutiny by the scientific community," Ereditato writes. "Never did I or any of my colleagues at OPERA talk of a discovery or a final result."
Stanco disagrees. "We should have been more cautious, more careful, presented the result in not such a strong way, more preliminarily," he says. "Experimentalists in physics can make mistakes. But the way in which we handle them, the way we present them ? we have some responsibility for that."
Autiero says he did not feel pressured to resign and is wary of having his resignation viewed as a punishment for experimental errors. "I don't think this should be the message, otherwise nobody will ever work seriously," he says.
He will remain on the OPERA team and looks forward to focusing on the research itself. "To me, the fact that I was also covering this management role was a kind of duty," Autiero says. "I will continue to do physics as I was doing before. I will continue to work on this neutrino velocity measurement, and also other subjects. This is my real job."
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