OPERA NEUTRINOS AND DEFORMED SPECIAL RELATIVITY

In a recent study, Cohen and Glashow argue that superluminal neutrinos of the type recently reported by OPERA should be affected by anomalous Cherenkov-like processes. This causes them to lose much of their energy before reaching the OPERA detectors. Related concerns were reported also by Gonzalez-Mestres, Bi et al., and Cowsik et al., who argued that pions cannot decay to superluminal neutrinos over part of the energy range studied by OPERA. We observe here that these arguments are set within a framework in which Lorentz symmetry is broken, by the presence of a preferred frame. We further show that these anomalous processes are forbidden if Lorentz symmetry is instead "deformed", preserving the relativity of inertial frames. These deformations add nonlinear terms to energymomentum relations, conservation laws and Lorentz transformations in a way that is consistent with the relativity of inertial observers. © 2012 World Scientific Publishing Company.