Fed Up With Sluggish Neutrinos, Scientists Force Light To Move Faster Than Its Own Speed Limit
Four-Wave Mixing In four-wave mixing, researchers send "seed" pulses of laser light into a heated cell containing atomic rubidium vapor along with a separate "pump" beam at a different frequency. The vapor amplifies the seed pulse and shifts its peak forward, making it superluminal. NIST Our nation's official keepers of time and other standards are breaking one of the cardinal rules: They have figured out how to make superluminal light pulses. This paradoxical sentence - faster-than-light light - is from a new paper explaining how to make the sine wave of light hunch in on itself and arrive a few nanoseconds earlier than it would if it had moved at light speed. Nothing can move faster than light, as neutrinos coldly reminded us earlier this year. Einstein's constant C, for the speed of light in a vacuum, is a universal constant. But researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology are...