In the middle of the camber is a specially constructed cloud with extremely weird and strong optical properties, that changes how fast light of various frequencies move through it ( slowing only, but to various degrees). The experiment is about peaks made out of standing waves, and the standing waves are already all over the inside of the test chamber when the experiment begins. The pivotal point is that the experiment isn’t about turning on some kind of laser, that sends out a pulse, that suddenly moves faster than light. The peaks move around, and you can more or less keep track of where they are (more exactly you can infer where they were after the fact). These peaks are usually called “wave groups” or “wave packets”. These light waves interact in such a way that they create peaks, like when you pluck two slightly-out-of-tune guitar strings and you hear a pulsing sound. The experiment essentially requires a “standing wave” in the test chamber, with waves at many frequencies. This is pretty tricky, but it comes down to a distinction between “phase velocity” (light speed, “c”) and “ group velocity” (depends on the medium). The very short answer is: nope! No physical object ever travels faster than light, and yet the experiment is real. Physicist: This experiment showed up in the popular media about ten years ago, and it’s still bothering people today. If anything goes faster than light does that mean it goes backwards in time? Is this experiment genuine? Basically what the guy does is speed up light so that it goes faster than the than the speed of light. "We will continue to study the nature of light and hopefully it will provide us with a better insight about the natural world and further stimulate new thinking towards peaceful applications that will benefit all humanity.The original question was: I was reading an article by Lijun Wang the experiment I think is called the NEC experiment. Einstein's Theory of Relativity still stands, however, because it is still correct to say that information cannot be transmitted faster than the vacuum speed of light," said Dr. "Our experiment shows that the generally held misconception that nothing can move faster than the speed of light, is wrong. A light pulse can thus traverse the distance between two points faster than its vacuum speed. Unlike with normal dispersion, anomalous dispersion has the extraordinary effect of enabling a light pulse to appear again at a distant point along its direction of propagation and produce the exact shape of the light pulse that entered the chamber. Anomalous dispersion causes components with a shorter wavelength in a vacuum to have a longer wavelength in the chamber and conversely, components with a longer wavelength in a vacuum have a shorter wavelength in the chamber. The effect of anomalous dispersion on the wavelengths of the components of light, however, is to modify them. This unusual phenomenon is the result of "anomalous dispersion", an effect not seen in nature in transparent materials and is created by the non-natural thermal state of the cesium gas used in the chamber.Ī pulse of light consists of many components, each at a different wavelength as can be seen when sunlight passes through a prism in "normal dispersion" and is broken down into its constituent colors. But when passed through the specially prepared chamber, light emerged 62 nanoseconds earlier than it would have had it passed through the chamber in a vacuum. The 3-microsecond long pulse of light would normally take only 0.2 nanoseconds to pass through the chamber in a vacuum. In the experiment, NEC scientists measured the time taken by a pulse of light to pass through a 6cm-long specially prepared chamber containing cesium gas. The research work, which may result in significantly faster information transfer speeds across networks and in computers, was published in Nature by NEC research scientists Dr. Scientists at NEC Corporation's (NEC) basic research unit in the US claim to have proven that light can travel faster than its acknowledged speed in vacuum in a successful experiment in superluminal light propagation.ĭespite exceeding the vacuum speed of light, the experiment is not at odds with Einstein's theory of relativity and is explainable by existing physical theory. Laser pulse travels 300 times faster than light
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