The Daily Populous Friday April 3rd, 2026 day edition
Authored by sciencealert.com and submitted by sibun_rath

For the first time, physicists have observed that 'holes' in light can move faster than the light itself.

They're known as phase singularities or optical vortices, and since the 1970s, scientists have predicted that, just as eddies in a river can move faster than the flowing water around them, so too can whirlpools in a wave of light outrun the light they're embedded within.

This does not break relativity, which states that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light. That's because the vortices carry no mass, energy, or information, and their motion is based on the evolving geometry of the wave pattern rather than any physical motion through space.

However, capturing this phenomenon in action has been difficult to accomplish because it unfolds on extremely small scales of space and time. The achievement is a triumph of electron microscopy.

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"Our discovery reveals universal laws of nature shared by all types of waves, from sound waves and fluid flows to complex systems such as superconductors," says Ido Kaminer, physicist at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology.

"This breakthrough provides us with a powerful technological tool: the ability to map the motion of delicate nanoscale phenomena in materials, revealed through a new method (electron interferometry) that enhances image sharpness."

Although to our eyes light appears uniform, it has a lot going on that we cannot easily discern. Light can be subject to disturbances similar to those seen in other systems dominated by flow dynamics, including a type of phase singularity scientists call optical vortices.

Light can behave both as a particle and a wave; an optical vortex forms when the wave twists as it travels, like a corkscrew. At the very center of that twist, the light cancels itself out, leaving a point of zero intensity – a kind of dark "hole" in the light.

It's mathematically understood that two singularities in a reference frame will be drawn together, gaining speed as they approach, reaching velocities that appear to exceed the speed of light in a vacuum.

"As opposite-charged singularities approach each other, their paths in spacetime must form a continuous curve at the annihilation point, forcing their acceleration to unbounded velocities right before the annihilation," the researchers explain in their paper.

It has been observed in other systems, but studying how this scenario might play out in a light field is somewhat trickier. Much work has been done in physics labs to study it, but observations of optical vortices have been limited by the technology's inability to keep up with the speed at which vortex formation, motion, and collision unfold.

To overcome these limitations, Kaminer and his colleagues recorded the behavior of optical vortices in a two-dimensional material called hexagonal boron nitride.

This material supports unusual light waves called phonon polaritons – hybrids of light and atomic vibrations – that move much more slowly than light alone and can be tightly confined. This creates intricate interference patterns filled with many vortices, allowing the researchers to track their motion in detail.

The second, crucial part was capturing those dynamics in real time. The team deployed a specialized high-speed electron microscope with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution, which recorded events unfolding over just 3 quadrillionths of a second.

Related: Faster-Than-Light Speeds Could Be Why Gamma-Ray Bursts Seem to Go Backwards in Time

They ran the experiment many times, each time recording at a slight delay compared to the previous run. By stacking together the hundreds of images generated this way, the researchers created a timelapse of the vortices as they hurtled towards and annihilated each other, their velocities very briefly reaching superluminal speeds in the process.

The experiment took place in a two-dimensional context. The next step, the researchers say, is to try to extend their work into higher dimensions to observe more complicated behavior. They also say the techniques they developed could help address some of the current limitations of electron microscopy.

"We believe these innovative microscopy techniques will enable the study of hidden processes in physics, chemistry, and biology," Kaminer says, "revealing for the first time how nature behaves in its fastest and most elusive moments."

The research has been published in Nature.

macthebearded on April 3rd, 2026 at 09:40 UTC »

Hey everyone, science literacy guy here. You might have seen a project I worked on in the news yesterday. Few things we should go over…

Never ever ever trust these pop-sci articles at face value. They're generally highly misleading at best, and often the editors don't actually grasp the science in question nor do they have any back and forth with the researchers to ensure the article communicates what it should. This is actually a pretty big issue in the world of science communication (the "field" of translating research into a context fit for public consumption). Its strongly advisable to dig up the actual journal paper being referenced and check things like how many co-authors are listed on the paper, how many papers the primary author(s) publish in a year, how many times the paper has been cited, if the paper is published to a respected peer-reviewed journal, etc.

Right off the bat there are some inconsistencies. The article talks about how this doesn't break relativity because the vortices carry no information, but that's not really the big takeaway on that front. When you see mention of "the speed of light," what we're really talking about is the speed of causality - which is indeed how fast light travels in a vacuum and ONLY in a vacuum. That causality word is why this speed limit is known as c. If we look at the actual journal publication, we see that the experiment measured the speed of light in a material - in this case, hexagonal boron nitride membranes. Light propagates through hexagonal boron nitride at about 0.4c, or 40% of the speed of light in a vacuum. The results of this experiment don't violate relativity, not because the vortices carry no information (though that may be true, this is not my area of expertise), but because nothing in this experiment exceeds c. A common example of this sort of thing is that blue glow you see in nuclear reactor pools - Cherenkov Radiation, as it's known - essentially the light equivalent of a sonic boom, which is only possible because the speed of light is reduced in the material.

There are a good many comments about how the vortices surely carry information using variations of the logic that you could determine a null or non-null result from it. That's not really what physics means when talking about something carrying information. Information is a specific term in physics that essentially means the particle in question carries states like charge, spin, etc inherited from the source that can affect the destination. Again, this isn't my specific niche so I can't comment on whether these vortices do not in fact carry information, but the logical "well we can look at xyz" doesn't really apply. As an example, let's look at Hawking Radiation. This is radiation (theorized to be) emitted from black holes. As you've likely heard, nothing can escape a black hole - not even light - so what gives? Hawking Radiation isn't a simple "photon goes in, photon comes out"... the radiation emitted inherits nothing from the energy or mass absorbed by the black hole, and thus does not violate existing theories about black holes. There's no carry-through here, and that's what we mean when we say something doesn't carry information. It doesn't mean it can't be measured, it means that the measurement at the destination (Hawking Radiation) will reveal nothing of the source (the planet the black hole ate, or whatever).

There's always more to be said, but I think those are the important bits people are getting hung up on here.

pornborn on April 3rd, 2026 at 05:53 UTC »

They just proved that “nothing” moves faster than light.

Markimus_Prime on April 3rd, 2026 at 05:12 UTC »

The holes don’t carry mass, energy, or information - so they’re basically a void? So we’re literally measuring the speed of dark?