[Physics FAQ] - [Copyright]

Updated March 1993 by SIC;

Original by Scott I. Chase.
Do tachyons exist?
There was a young lady named Bright,
Whose speed was far faster than light.
She went out one day,
In a relative way,
And returned the previous night!
Reginald Buller
It is a well known fact that nothing can travel faster than the speed of light.
At best, a massless particle
travels at the speed of light. But is this really true? In 1962, Bilaniuk, Deshp
ande, and Sudarshan, Am. J.
Phys. 30, 718 (1962), said "no". A very readable paper is Bilaniuk and Sudarshan
, Phys. Today 22, 43
(1969). Here is a brief overview.
Draw a graph, with momentum (p) on the x-axis, and energy (E) on the y-axis. The
n draw the "light
cone", two lines with the equations E = p. This divides our 1+1 dimensional space
-time into two
regions. Above and below are the "timelike" quadrants, and to the left and right
are the "spacelike"
quadrants.
Now the fundamental fact of relativity is that
E - p = m
where E is an object's energy, p is its momentum, and m is its rest mass, which
we'll just call 'mass'. In
case you're wondering, we are working in units where c=1. For any non-zero value
of m, this is a
hyperbola with branches in the timelike regions. It passes through the point (p,
E) = (0,m), where the
particle is at rest. Any particle with mass m is constrained to move on the uppe
r branch of this hyperbola.
(Otherwise, it is "off shell", a term you hear in association with virtual parti
but that's another
cles
topic.) For massless particles, E = p, and the particle moves on the light-cone.
These two cases are given the names tardyon (or bradyon in more modern usage) an
d luxon, for "slow
particle" and "light particle". Tachyon is the name given to the supposed "fast
particle" which would
move with v > c. Tachyons were first introduced into physics by Gerald Feinberg,
in his seminal paper
"On the possibility of faster-than-light particles" [Phys. Rev. 159, 1089 1105 (19
67)].
Now another familiar relativistic equation is
E = m[1-(v/c)]-.
Tachyons (if they exist) have v > c. This means that E is imaginary! Well, what
if we take the rest mass
m, and take it to be imaginary? Then E is negative real, and E - p = m < 0. Or, p E = M, where M
is real. This is a hyperbola with branches in the spacelike region of spacetime.
The energy and
momentum of a tachyon must satisfy this relation.
You can now deduce many interesting properties of tachyons. For example, they ac
celerate (p goes up) if
they lose energy (E goes down). Furthermore, a zero-energy tachyon is "transcend
ent", or moves
infinitely fast. This has profound consequences. For example, let's say that the
re were electrically

charged tachyons. Since they would move faster than the speed of light in the va
cuum, they should
Do tachyons exist? http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/tach
yons.html
1 of 3 25-04-2015 23:26
produce Cherenkov radiation. This would lower their energy, causing them to acce
lerate more! In other
words, charged tachyons would probably lead to a runaway reaction releasing an a
rbitrarily large amount
of energy. This suggests that coming up with a sensible theory of anything excep
t free (noninteracting)
tachyons is likely to be difficult. Heuristically, the problem is that we can ge
t spontaneous creation of
tachyon-antitachyon pairs, then do a runaway reaction, making the vacuum unstabl
e. To treat this
precisely requires quantum field theory, which gets complicated. It is not easy
to summarize results here.
However, one reasonably modern reference is Tachyons, Monopoles, and Related Top
ics, E. Recami, ed.
(North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978).
However, tachyons are not entirely invisible. You can imagine that you might pro
duce them in some
exotic nuclear reaction. If they are charged, you could "see" them by detecting
the Cherenkov light they
produce as they speed away faster and faster. Such experiments have been done bu
t, so far, no tachyons
have been found. Even neutral tachyons can scatter off normal matter with experi
mentally observable
consequences. Again, no such tachyons have been found.
How about using tachyons to transmit information faster than the speed of light,
in violation of Special
Relativity? It's worth noting that when one considers the relativistic quantum m
echanics of tachyons, the
question of whether they "really" go faster than the speed of light becomes much
more touchy! In this
framework, tachyons are waves that satisfy a wave equation. Let's treat free tac
hyons of spin zero, for
simplicity. We'll set c = 1 to keep things less messy. The wavefunction of a sin
gle such tachyon can be
expected to satisfy the usual equation for spin-zero particles, the Klein-Gordon
equation:
(? + m)f = 0
where ? is the D'Alembertian, which in 3+1 dimensions is just
? = ?/?t - ?/?x - ?/?y - ?/?z.
The difference with tachyons is that m is negative, and so m is imaginary.
To simplify the math a bit, let's work in 1+1 dimensions with co-ordinates x and
t, so that
? = ?/?t - ?/?x.
Everything we'll say generalizes to the real-world 3+1-dimensional case. Now, re
gardless of m, any
solution is a linear combination, or superposition, of solutions of the form
f(t,x) = exp(-iEt + ipx)
where E - p = m. When m is negative there are two essentially different cases. Eithe
r | p | = | E |, in
which case E is real and we get solutions that look like waves whose crests move
along at the rate | p/E | =
1, i.e., no slower than the speed of light. Or | p | < | E |, in which case E is
imaginary and we get solutions
that look like waves that amplify exponentially as time passes!
We can decide as we please whether or not we want to consider the second type of

solution. They seem

weird, but then the whole business is weird, after all.
(1) If we do permit the second type of solution, we can solve the Klein-Gordon e
quation with any
reasonable initial data
that is, any reasonable values of f and its first time d
erivative at t = 0. (For the
precise definition of "reasonable", consult your local mathematician.) This is t
ypical of wave equations.
And, also typical of wave equations, we can prove the following thing: if the so
lution f and its time
derivative are zero outside the interval [-L, L] when t = 0, they will be zero o
utside the interval [-L- | t |,
L + | t |] at any time t. In other words, localized disturbances do not spread w
ith speed faster than the
speed of light! This seems to go against our notion that tachyons move faster th
an the speed of light, but
it's a mathematical fact, known as "unit propagation velocity".
Do tachyons exist? http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/tach
yons.html
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(2) If we don't permit the second sort of solution, we can't solve the Klein-Gor
don equation for all
reasonable initial data, but only for initial data whose Fourier transforms vani
sh in the interval [-| m |, | m
|]. By the Paley-Wiener theorem this has an odd consequence: it becomes impossib
le to solve the
equation for initial data that vanish outside some interval [-L, L]! In other wo
rds, we can no longer
"localize" our tachyon in any bounded region in the first place, so it becomes i
mpossible to decide whether
or not there is "unit propagation velocity" in the precise sense of part (1). Of
course, the crests of the
waves exp(-iEt + ipx) move faster than the speed of light, but these waves were
never localized in the
first place!
The bottom line is that you can't use tachyons to send information faster than t
he speed of light from one
place to another. Doing so would require creating a message encoded some way in
a localized tachyon
field, and sending it off at superluminal speed toward the intended receiver. Bu
t as we have seen you
can't have it both ways: localized tachyon disturbances are subluminal and super
luminal disturbances are
nonlocal.
See also the relativity FAQ Faster than light.
Do tachyons exist? http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/physics/ParticleAndNuclear/tach
yons.html
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