Shock CERN neutrino results could have been caused by faulty fibre connector

Organisation to re-run experiment to discover if fault caused faster-than-light results

Shock results observed by CERN last year that appeared to show that particles called neutrinos had travelled faster than the speed of light could have been caused by a faulty fibre connector, the organisation had said.

The result had caused shockwaves among the scientific community and beyond as it would have radically changed our core knowledge of physics and the universe.

In a statement released on Thursday CERN said it had identified two possible issues with the equipment used to measure the experiment, one of which would actually mean the results had underestimated the speed of the neutrinos.

"The OPERA collaboration identified two possible effects that could have an influence on its neutrino timing measurement. These both require further tests with a short pulsed beam," it said.

"If confirmed, one would increase the size of the measured effect, the other would diminish it. The first possible effect concerns an oscillator used to provide the time stamps for GPS synchronisations. It could have led to an overestimate of the neutrino's time of flight."

However, the organisation also said another fault could have caused the results measured to have been faster than actually occurred.

"The second concerns the optical fibre connector that brings the external GPS signal to the OPERA master clock, which may not have been functioning correctly when the measurements were taken," it said.

"If this is the case, it could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos."

The organisation is now set to re-run the experiment in May in order to see if these issues had caused the apparently incorrect results.

Last week CERN announced it was increasing the power of the Large Hadron Collider as part of its hunt for the elusive Higgs Boson, the discovery of which would underpin a large part of humanity's understanding of the universe.