Breaking the universal speed limit: Emission of=20 radiation by superluminal sources in the=20 laboratory and the observable universe*

This lecture will describe how electromagnetic disturbances have been made to travel in a laboratory at Los Alamos at up to 8c, i.e., eight times the speed of light in a vacuum. I will go on to describe how such superluminal (faster-than-light) phenomena also occur all over the observable universe, bombarding us with radiation that has very distinctive properties. At this point, most physicists might mutter =93what about Einstein? Singleton must be a loony=94 etc., and leave the room. However, please bear with me: no laws of physics were broken or even cruelly treated in the making of this production. The emission of electromagnetic radiation from a superluminal charged particle was studied independently by Heaviside and Sommerfeld over one hundred years ago. However, the subsequent publication of Einstein=92s Special Theory of Relativity effectively curtailed the research field until Nobel Laureate Vitaly Ginzburg and his coworkers pointed out in the 1980s that no physical principle forbids emission by extended, massless superluminal sources. A polarization current density (dP/dt; see Maxwell's fourth equation) can provide such a source; the individual charged particles creating the polarization do not move faster than the speed of light, and yet it is relatively trivial to make the envelope of the polarization current density to do so. Based on these ideas, we have constructed four separate =93superluminal antennas=94 that demonstrate that polarization current envelopes can indeed be made to move more rapidly than the speed of light in vacuo. As mentioned above, so far, the fastest we have managed thus far is 8c, or warp-factor 2 in the language of Trekkies. These laboratory sources emit tightly focused packets of electromagnetic radiation, the angular width of which sharpens with increasing distance, and whose intensity decreases more slowly with distance than the inverse-square law. Superluminal sources are not just restricted to the laboratory; we believe that they contribute to the radiation received at Earth from gamma-ray bursts, pulsars and other astronomical objects. I will describe how the characteristic emission from superluminal polarization currents that move in a circular path, driven by a pulsar=92s rotating magnetic field, can account for the spectra of the Crab and 8 other pulsars over 16-18 orders of magnitude of frequency with a minimum of adjustable parameters. Moreover, we have analyzed data from around 1000 pulsars that shows that their other properties may be simply described by the emission from a rotating superluminal polarization current.


Hubert van Hecke
Last modified: Thu Feb 24 15:24:26 MST 2011