Scientists 'break speed of light'
Updated on 15 August 2007
Scientists claim to have broken the ultimate speed record - by making photons travel faster than light.
Exceeding the speed of light, 186,000 miles per second, is supposed to be completely impossible.
According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate an object through the light barrier.
Travelling faster than light also turns back time with bizarre consequences. An astronaut moving beyond light speed would theoretically arrive at his destination before leaving.
But two German physicists now claim to have forced light to overcome its own speed limit using the strange phenomenon known as quantum tunnelling.
They set up an experiment in which microwave photons, energetic packets of light, appeared to travel "instantaneously" between two prisms forming the halves of a cube placed a metre apart.
When the prisms were placed together, photons fired at one edge passed straight through them, as expected. 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 a longer distance, they arrived at their detector at exactly the same time as the reflected photons. In effect, they seemed to have travelled faster than light.
Dr Gunter Nimtz, one of the physicists from the University of Koblenz, told New Scientist magazine: "For the time being, this is the only violation of special relativity that I know of."
Quantum tunnelling is a well known phenomenon that occurs as a direct result of the strange uncertainty which pervades nature at very small scales. It allows sub-atomic particles to break apparently unbreakable barriers.
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