Physicists Discover Something That Can Travel Faster Than Light: The Darkness Inside It

For the first time, physicists have discovered that ‘holes’ of light can travel faster than light itself.

They are known as phase singularities or optical vortices, and since the 1970s, scientists have predicted that, just as the eddies in the river can move faster than the water flowing around them, so can the waves of light waves than the light they are embedded in.

This does not eliminate relativity, which means that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That’s because vortices have no mass, energy, or information, and their motion depends on the continuous geometry of the wave pattern rather than the motion of the body in space.

However, capturing this phenomenon in action has been difficult to accomplish because it occurs on very small scales of space and time. The breakthrough is the triumph of electron microscopy.

“Our discovery reveals universal laws of nature that are shared by all types of waves, from sound waves and fluid flows to complex systems such as superconductors,” says Ido Kaminer, a physicist at the Technion Institute of Technology in Israel.

“This success gives us a powerful technological tool: the ability to map the movement of light nanoscale objects in materials, revealed by a new method (electron interferometry) that improves the clarity of the image.”

Although light appears to our eyes to be the same, it has many things going on that we cannot easily perceive. Light can be subject to the same disturbances seen in other systems governed by flow dynamics, including a type of one-dimensional particles scientists call optical vortices.

Light can behave as both a particle and a wave; optical vortex formation as the wave twists as it travels, like a square. In the middle of that twist, the light collapses, leaving a point of zero energy – a kind of dark “hole” in the light.

It is mathematically understood that two particles in a single frame of reference will collide, increasing in speed as they approach, reaching speeds that seem to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum.

“When people with different charges approach each other, their trajectories in spacetime must create a continuous curve in the destruction zone, forcing their acceleration to an infinite speed before destruction,” the researchers explain in their paper.

It has been observed in other systems, but learning how this situation can play out in a light environment is somewhat difficult. Much work has been done in physics laboratories to study it, but the observation of optical waves has been limited by the inability of technology to keep up with the speed at which the vortex is formed, vibrated and collided.

In order to overcome these limitations, Kaminer and his colleagues recorded the behavior of optical vortices in two materials called hexagonal boron nitride.

The device supports unusual light waves called phonon polaritons – hybrids of light and atomic motion – which travel much slower than a single light and can be trapped tightly. This creates complex disturbance patterns filled with many vortices, allowing researchers to track their movement in detail.

The second, important part was capturing that power in real time. The team deployed a special high-speed microscope with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, recording events occurring at more than 3 quadrillionths of a second.

Related: Faster-than-Light Speeds May Be Why Gamma-Ray Bursts Seem to Go Back in Time

They’ve done the test several times, each time recording with a slight delay compared to last time. By collecting hundreds of images produced in this way, the researchers have created the time of the waves as they hit each other and destroy each other, their speed reaches a very high speed in the process.

The experiment took place in two-dimensional conditions. The next step, the researchers say, is to try to expand their work to higher levels to see more complex behaviors. They also say that the methods they have developed can help overcome the current limitations of electron microscopy.

Kaminer says: “We believe that these new microscopy techniques will help to study the hidden processes of physics, chemistry and biology, and reveal for the first time how nature behaves in the fastest and most difficult time.”

Research published in Nature.