Relativistic Superluminal Neutrinos

Understand

We present a possible solution to the reported OPERA anomaly for the speed of neutrinos, based on the idea that it is a local effect caused by a scalar field sourced by the earth.

• The coupling of the scalar to neutrinos effectively changes the background metric where neutrinos propagate, leading to superluminality.
• The strength of the coupling is set by a new mass scale, which should be at $1\, {\rm TeV}$ to account for the OPERA anomaly.
• Moreover, if this scenario is valid, the neutrino velocity depends on the baseline distance between the emission and detection points in such a way that superluminal signals turn to subluminal ones for baseline distances roughly larger than the earth radius.