Particles faster than light detected

HAMBURG: Two German physicists from the University of Koblenz claim to have done the impossible by finding photons that have broken the speed of light.

If Gunter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen claims are confirmed, they will have proved wrong Albert Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which requires an infinite amount of energy to propel an object at more than 186,000 miles per second.

They say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons — energetic packets of light — travelled “instantaneously” between a pair of prisms that had been moved from a few millimetres to up to one metre apart. When the prisms were placed together, photons fired at one edge passed straight through them.

After they were moved apart, most of the photons reflected off the first prism they encountered and were picked up by a detector. But a few photons appeared to “tunnel” through the gap separating them as if the prisms were still held together.  Although these photons had travelled further, they arrived at their detector at exactly the same time as the reflected photons. In effect, they had travelled faster than light. Nimtz said, “This is the only violation of special relativity that I know of.”

The duo said being able to travel faster than light would lead to bizarre consequences. For instance, an astronaut moving faster than light would theoretically arrive at a destination before leaving, they said. They also said they were investigating a phenomenon called quantum tunnelling, which allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable laws.