Researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have developed a novel way of producing light pulses that are "superluminal" -- in some sense they travel faster than the speed of light. The technique, called four-wave mixing, reshapes parts of light pulses and advances them ahead of where they would have been had they been left to travel unaltered through a vacuum. The new method could be used to improve the timing of communications signals and to investigate the propagation of quantum correlations.
According to Einstein's special theory of relativity, light traveling in a vacuum is the universal speed limit. No information can travel faster than light.
But there's kind of a loophole. A short burst of light arrives as a sort of (usually) symmetric curve like a bell curve in statistics. The leading edge of that curve can't exceed the speed of light, but the main hump, the peak of the pulse, can be skewed forward or backward, arriving sooner or later than it normally would.
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