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Five years ago, a wave of
discontent swept away the 55-mile-per-hour U.S. speed limit. Nowadays,
some physicists are taking a hard look at the 670-million-miles-per-hour
speed limit of light in a vacuum, or c.
Albert Einstein posted this limit in his
1905 theory of special relativity. Although popular lore and some physics
textbooks still contend that nothing races faster than c,
experiments going back decades have repeatedly shown that light can beat
that speed under certain conditions.
A few scientists argue that those experiments
hint that Einstein was wrong. Two new experiments reveal dramatic
additional evidence of superluminal velocity but make no clear case for
repealing Einstein's law, scientists say.
In one study, conducted in Italy, scientists
propagated superluminal microwaves through air by bouncing them off a
mirror. In the other, led by a New Jersey researcher, a laser pulse
approaching a gas-filled cell's entry window materialized at the cell's
exit glass before even reaching the cell.
Although superluminal phenomena might someday
help speed up computers—an avenue being explored by Raymond Y. Chiao of
the University of California, Berkeley—the main excitement around these
experiments stems from basic physics implications.
At stake is the idea that a cause must precede an effect. If
experimenters found that information can go somewhere faster than c,
"you would get into nonsensical types of predictions, like going back
in time and shooting your grandmother," explains Peter W. Milonni of
Los Alamos (N.M.) National Laboratory.
Günter Nimtz of the University of Cologne in Germany contends
that
information can indeed travel faster than c, casting doubts on both
causality and special relativity. In 1995, for example, his research team
encoded Mozart's 40th symphony in a microwave beam traveling at 4.7 times c
to a receiver.
However, Aephraim M. Steinberg of the University of
Toronto argues that aside from Nimtz and a few other "vocal
dissenters," mainstream physicists agree that such experiments
"do not support any idea of causality violation." One challenge,
however, is to exactly define information, or a signal.
Experiments dating back to the early 1990s by Nimtz,
Steinberg, Chiao, and others have shown superluminal tunneling of optical
photons through mirrors (SN: 7/2/94, p. 6) and of microwaves through
so-called forbidden zones of waveguides.
The Italian scientists, led by Anedio Ranfagni of the
Italian National Research Council in Florence, devised their experiment so
that reflected microwaves in open air overlap and interfere as the waves
speed away from the mirror. Constructive interference creates a moving
pulse along the axis of the apparatus whose speed varies according to the
configuration of the experiment. The researchers report in the May 22 Physical
Review Letters that within 1.4 meters of the mirror, they clocked such
pulses at up to 125 percent of c. Beyond that distance, the effect
dies out.
Because electromagnetic waves radiate through air much
as they do in a vacuum, Chiao says, the "spectacular work" by
the Italians demonstrates that even in a vacuum, light could outpace c.
In the laser experiment by Lijun Wang of NEC Research
Institute in Princeton, N.J., and his colleagues, the superluminal pulse,
which was preceded by a "pump" pulse to excite the amplifier,
has a negative velocity. That means that it "arrives at a distant
point 'earlier' than it even arrives at the input," explains
Steinberg, who is acquainted with the unpublished study but is not a
coauthor.
This isn't magic, he says. Rather, amplifiers, like the
cell in the experiment, respond to certain frequencies by building a
replica of the incoming pulse at the output. In this case, the time a
pulse with speed c would take to cross the cell, multiplied by 300,
is the head start the outgoing pulse gains over the incoming one.
Although Wang declined to discuss the study, which was
submitted to Nature, some of its results were described May 30 in The
New York Times.
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