Physicists have long predicted that certain things can appear to move faster than the speed of light without breaking any laws of physics, and a research team has now captured one of these events on camera for the very first time. The phenomenon involves what scientists call optical vortices, which are tiny dark holes that form naturally inside beams of light. When a light wave twists like a corkscrew as it travels, the light at the center of that twist cancels itself out, leaving a point of complete darkness surrounded by light on all sides. Scientists predicted in the 1970s that two of these dark points approaching each other would accelerate sharply, briefly reaching speeds that exceed the speed of light before they collide and vanish. This does not break Einstein’s theory of relativity, because the holes carry no mass, energy or information, and only those things are forbidden from going faster than light. A pattern of darkness shifting across a wave is governed by entirely different rules.
Observing it has been nearly impossible because it unfolds across distances and timescales far too small for standard tools to follow. A team at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology solved this by studying light waves inside a special material that slows them significantly and confines them into dense patterns with many vortices present at once. A specialized high-speed electron microscope capable of recording events over just three quadrillionths of a second then captured the dark holes as they rushed toward each other, briefly exceeded light speed, and disappeared. The lead physicist said the discovery reveals laws that apply across all wave systems, from sound and water to superconductors, and that the imaging techniques developed could allow scientists to observe hidden processes in physics, chemistry and biology that have never before been seen. The findings were published in Nature.
