Quantum Tunneling

Recent experiments have confirmed the finding that Quantum tunneling leads to particles being timed at faster-than-light speeds.

In these various experiments a particle, such as a photon, an electron, or rubidium atom are shot into a barrier. What is expected is that the particles will cause the electrons in that medium jump to higher energy levels, and when these excited electrons fall back to a ground state, they will rerelease the energy as reemitted photons, eventually passing out or the barrier. Theoretically this could create a delay in the light's transit time. However some particles emerge out the other side faster than if the same particle was not shot through the barrier, indicating possible faster than light travel. 

Quantum magazine reports: “The researchers reported that the rubidium atoms spent, on average, 0.61 milliseconds inside the barrier, in line with Larmor clock times theoretically predicted in the 1980s. That’s less time than the atoms would have taken to travel through free space. Therefore, the calculations indicate that if you made the barrier really thick, Steinberg said, the speedup would let atoms tunnel from one side to the other faster than light.”


Explanations for Quantum tunneling superluminal travel include: “some electrons in the quantum packet had a head start”, or “some particles were at the head of a probability wave form" (causing mismeasurement), or “it takes place across a smeared-out, probabilistic range of temporal values", and/or most often: “it doesn’t matter because a single particle cannot transmit information, and thus no laws of physics were broken.”

What’s known to be happening

An atom’s electron can be excited to a higher energy level by absorbing a photon packet of energy, and when the electron returns to a lower shell or ground state, it reemits this energy as a new photon.

What could be happening. 


Consider the following accepted Feynman diagrams:

What might be happening. (Warning: non standard theory).


What if some collisions occur of high enough energy to split the electron into an electron/positron pair. What if some positrons actually do travel back in time, this is a quantum reaction where anything can happen after all. What if some of these positrons then collide with, or excite other atoms into releasing a photon. A photon or electron could then emerge from the barrier faster than a particle traveling straight through. Overall entropy is not lost, the outcome is the same, just a bit faster.

Data Collected by Evan Robinson. Email: Ganymede2029@gmail.com