Tachyon They are hypothetical particles that always travel faster than light. Until recently, they were commonly thought to be entities that did not fit into the special theory of relativity. New paper In the journal Physics Review DThese faster-than-light particles “are not only not excluded by the theory, but also allow us to better understand its causal structure.”
“Movement at speeds faster than the speed of light is one of the most controversial problems in physics,” Professor Andrzej Dragan Researchers from the University of Warsaw and the National University of Singapore and their colleagues.
“Tachyons, hypothetical particles capable of traveling faster than the speed of light, are the awesome geniuses of modern physics.”
“Until recently, they were widely thought to be creations that did not fit into the special theory of relativity.”
“There are currently at least three known reasons why tachyons do not exist in quantum mechanics,” the researchers added.
“First, the ground state of the tachyon field must be unstable, which means that such faster-than-light particles would form avalanches.”
“Second, a change in the inertial observer must lead to a change in the number of particles observed in his reference system, but the presence of, say, seven particles cannot depend on who is looking at it.”
“The third reason is that faster-than-light particles can have negative energies.”
“Previous difficulties with tachyons have a common root,” the physicists said.
“It turns out that the boundary conditions that determine the course of physical processes include not only the initial state of a system but also its final state.”
“Simply put, to calculate the probability of a quantum process involving tachyons, we need to know not only the past initial state but also the future final state.”
“Once this fact was incorporated into the theory, all of the aforementioned difficulties disappeared completely and the tachyon theory became mathematically consistent.”
“It's a bit like internet advertising – one simple trick can solve the problem,” Prof Dragan said.
“The idea that the future influences the present, rather than the present determining the future, is not new in physics.”
“But until now this kind of view has at best been an unorthodox interpretation of certain quantum phenomena, and now we are forced to this conclusion by the theory itself.”
“We had to expand the state space to make room for tachyons.”
“We also predict that expanding the boundary conditions has consequences: a new kind of quantum entanglement appears in the theory, one that mixes the past and the future, that doesn't exist in classical particle theory.”
The team's paper also raises the question of whether tachyons described in this way are purely a mathematical possibility, or whether such particles might one day be observed.
“Tachyons are not merely a possibility but are in fact an essential component of the spontaneous destruction processes responsible for the formation of matter,” the authors say.
“This hypothesis implies that the Higgs field excitations, before the spontaneous symmetry breaking, could travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum.”
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Jerzy Paczos others2024. Covariant quantum field theory of tachyons. Physics Revision D 110(1):015006; doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.110.015006
This article is a version of a press release provided by the University of Warsaw.
Source: www.sci.news
