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Although people often say nothing travels faster than the speed of light, this cosmic speed limit only pertains to particles with information or mass.Darkness—the simple absence of photons—contains neither, and a new experiment confirms the 50-year-old hypothesis that dark can exceed 299,792,458 meters per second.Researchers confirmed this fact of physics by analyzing “dark points” within a single wavelength of a polariton, which travels roughly 100 times slower than light in a vacuum.
It’s an oft-touted fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light, but that’s technically not true. As Albert Einstein originally stated in 1905, information can’t travel faster than the speed of light, but something that’s both massless and devoid of information could technically blow past this cosmic speed limit—something such as “darkness” itself.
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Of course, an international team of scientists (led by researchers at Technion–Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel) wouldn’t just go out and measure “darkness”—or the absence of photons—directly. Instead, they relied on “dark points” within light waves. You can think of these points as tiny holes in a wave structure where amplitude drops to zero, which is often why they’re referred to as “zero points” or “null points” within light waves. They’re points of complete darkness embedded within a light field.
These create what are known as vortices, and the authors describe this phenomenon as similar to the vortex in a river overtaking the flow of water itself, in such a way that their speed is technically superluminal (a.k.a. faster than light). The results of the study were published in the journal Nature.
“Theory has long predicted that optical singularities can exhibit superluminal motion, particularly at moments close to their creation or annihilation, where their velocities can become unbounded,” the authors wrote. “We monitor the ultrafast dynamics of optical phase singularities with deep sub-wavelength spatial and deep sub-cycle temporal resolutions, revealing their acceleration near annihilation events.”
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Proving that darkness can outpace light wasn’t easy, and it required a unique microscopy system. Using this advanced laser setup, coupled with a specialized opto-mechanical system, researchers gathered data at highly accurate spatial and temporal resolution. Additionally, the experiment relied on a thin hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) flake—a material in which light transforms into “light-sound waves” known as polaritons. This quasiparticle is essentially a light-matter hybrid that crucially slows down the speed of light by roughly 100 times compared to light traveling in a vacuum (still much faster than the speed of sound).
It’s in this state that “dark point” vortices can be seen surpassing the speed of light.
“Our discovery reveals universal laws of nature shared by all types of waves, from sound waves and fluid flows to complex systems such as superconductors,” Ido Kaminer, senior author of the study from Technion, said in a press statement. “We believe these innovative microscopy techniques will enable the study of hidden processes in physics, chemistry, and biology, revealing for the first time how nature behaves in its fastest and most elusive moments.”
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Darren lives in Portland, has a cat, and writes/edits about sci-fi and how our world works. You can find his previous stuff at Gizmodo and Paste if you look hard enough.