Académique Documents
Professionnel Documents
Culture Documents
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
fffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff
ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff[Physics FAQ] - [Copyright]
Updated March 1993 by SIC;
Original by Scott I. Chase.
Do tachyons exist?
There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned the previous night!
Reginald Buller
It is a well known fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
At best, a massless particle
travels at the speed of light. But is this really true? In 1962, Bilaniuk, Deshp
ande, and Sudarshan, Am. J.
Phys. 30, 718 (1962), said "no". A very readable paper is Bilaniuk and Sudarshan
, Phys. Today 22, 43
(1969). Here is a brief overview.
Draw a graph, with momentum (p) on the x-axis, and energy (E) on the y-axis. The
n draw the "light
cone", two lines with the equations E = p. This divides our 1+1 dimensional space
-time into two
regions. Above and below are the "timelike" quadrants, and to the left and right
are the "spacelike"
quadrants.
Now the fundamental fact of relativity is that
E - p = m
where E is an object's energy, p is its momentum, and m is its rest mass, which
we'll just call 'mass'. In
case you're wondering, we are working in units where c=1. For any non-zero value
of m, this is a
hyperbola with branches in the timelike regions. It passes through the point (p,
E) = (0,m), where the
particle is at rest. Any particle with mass m is constrained to move on the uppe
r branch of this hyperbola.
(Otherwise, it is "off shell", a term you hear in association with virtual parti
cles
but that's another
topic.) For massless particles, E = p, and the particle moves on the light-cone.
These two cases are given the names tardyon (or bradyon in more modern usage) an
d luxon, for "slow
particle" and "light particle". Tachyon is the name given to the supposed "fast
particle" which would
move with v > c. Tachyons were first introduced into physics by Gerald Feinberg,
in his seminal paper
"On the possibility of faster-than-light particles" [Phys. Rev. 159, 1089 1105 (19
67)].
Now another familiar relativistic equation is
E = m[1-(v/c)]-.
Tachyons (if they exist) have v > c. This means that E is imaginary! Well, what
if we take the rest mass
m, and take it to be imaginary? Then E is negative real, and E - p = m < 0. Or, p E = M, where M
is real. This is a hyperbola with branches in the spacelike region of spacetime.
The energy and
momentum of a tachyon must satisfy this relation.
You can now deduce many interesting properties of tachyons. For example, they ac
celerate (p goes up) if