Researchers at NIST have developed a new method to create “superluminal” light pulses that appear to travel faster than the speed of light. The technique, called four-wave mixing, reshapes light pulses by amplifying the leading edge and attenuating the trailing edge, effectively skewing the pulse peak forward in time.
The new method generates cleaner, less noisy pulses with a greater increase in speed compared to previous methods. In the experiment, the pulses’ peaks arrived 50 nanoseconds faster than light traveling through a vacuum.
Potential applications include improving the timing of communications signals and investigating quantum correlations. The researchers hope to explore how useful this fast light could be for the transmission and processing of quantum information.
Keywords: superluminal, four-wave mixing, quantum discord
