faster than light speed..... photons tunneling.....

I have heard from several different sources that FTL speed has been achieved in expirimentation via tunneling of photons. Does anybody know some place where I can read up on this?

the basic gist as I've come to understand it.....

a photon in shot un-interupted.....attained light speed.

a photon was shot with a barrier in front of it....causing it to actually speed up as it tunneled through the barrier. The oscillation frequency of the photon sped up as it hit the barrier to pass through it......lessening it's mass allowing the same propulsion energy to result in it moving faster than light. I've read in several questionable places that the results varied in several tests ranging from 1.7x to 3x the speed of light in different trials.

this study is ofcourse intergal to our space exploration. If this is true....and we could find a way to increase the oscillation frequency of greater mass, reducing it to less than a photon.....allowing it to move at speeds double or more the speed of light with very little energy needed for propulsion....it would greatly enhance our ability for exploration.

yeah....it's a science topic....but philosophy is the root of science. Philosophy poses the question, science attempts to answer it.

anyway......I'm looking for a hard fact credible source.....not heresay.....

If you can remember the sites, please post the links. That aside...

This sounds familiar, and the only thing I remember off-hand was that the results were Not to be interpreted as a direct-Einsten-violation, warp-speed-just-round-the-corner kind of discovery.

For one thing (and this is why having the sites to examine would help), "tunneling" has been around for a while; electrons have been doing it in made-made devices for decades. "Tunneling" is more of a quantum-leap effect than a Newtonian transit from point A to point B, and so does not violate relativity.

A barrier lessening a photons's mass? I don't know how to interpret that.

Again, I'm sort of feeling my way around with this. Heck, where is The Omega? She'll have a much better handle on this than I will.

I havent read it yet, but there is a book "Faster Than the Speed of Light: The Story of a Scientific Speculation" by Joao Magueijo.

Its real stuff.

I majoring in physics but I never heard of this, it should certainly be all on the news if someone did something like that. Anyway, there is something in quantum field theory that looks a bit like that you described but there is no mass of the photon being lessened, perhaps these experiments are about this.

What happens in this theory is that particles can do quantum tunneling to points outside the cone of light, this mean there is a non zero probability that you can find a particle in a point outside of the cone of light. Points outside of the cone of light represent points in spacetime that you will need to travel faster than the speed of light to be there. So in this case, the barrier is the cone of light itself, not a physical barrier. If a particle can be at a point outside of the cone of light, it must have travelled faster than light to be there. Anyway it seems that these particles travelling faster than light cannot be observed, so you will never be able to do an experiment that proves a violation of special relativity.

Are you sure that is really the photon mass that is being lessened ? The mass of a photon is zero, it can´t be lessened or increased, the mass of a photon is zero and invariant. Perhaps we need to understand better what they mean for lessening the photon mass, since this certainly implies in a violation of special relativity. Anyway, particles that have a zero mass like a photon can only move at the speed of light so, to change the speed of a photon I think you will need to change its mass in someway.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_tunneling
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement

Quantum tunneling is nothing new. On the contrary. We learn about in first year quantum mechanics. Its a process whereby an elementary particle (such as an electron or a photon) may go from, say, one place to another without technically having enough energy to go from A to B.

Quantum entanglement is what Einstein called "spooky action at a distance". Electrons have a property called spin (think of it as a kind of internal rotation). If to electrons have interacted they're capable of "remembering" each others spin, so even if they're light years apart, if you change the spin of one electron, the other will react to it immediately - and appearantly faster than light-speed. The electrons can do this because they're both particles and fields smeared out over the entire Universe (yes, indeed) at the same time, so entangling two electrons means basically weaving their fields together.
This in NO way means we 're anywhere near a spaceship or anything (other than perhaps information) solid that can travel faster than the speed of light.