Context:
The physicist proposed an idea that an invincible particle called “Tachyons” could move faster than the speed of light.
Tachyons
- The word “Tachyon” is derived from the Greek word “tachy”, meaning swift. A tachyon is a quasiparticle that travels at speed faster than light.
- Tachyon is a hypothetical subatomic particle that travels faster than the speed of light. Tachyons are still not physically detected in any experiment, but their existence is mathematically hypothesized.
- Tachyons might be the true identity of dark matter, the mysterious form of matter that makes up most of the mass of almost every single galaxy in the universe, outweighing normal matter 5 to 1.
- The physicists found that a Tachyon cosmological model was just as good at explaining the supernova data as the standard cosmological model involving dark matter and dark energy.
- Gerald Feinberg first coined the term tachyon in 1967 in a paper related to faster-than-light particles and their kinetics with respect to special relativity.
ECG Sudarshan on Tachyons
- Indian-American physicist, E.C.G Sudarshan proposed the quantum theory for Tachyons, which challenged Einstein’s theory that nothing can move faster than light.
- He works in a variety of areas like elementary particle physics, quantum field theory, and quantum optics, between the 1950s and 1970s.
- His major contributions:
- V-A theory of the weak force: A theory about weak interaction between subatomic particles. This weak nuclear force fundamentally preferred one handedness over the other.
- Glauber–Sudarshan P representation: A quantum mechanical description of photons to explain the quantum properties of light.
- His later work in the 1960s became the basis for the Glauber–Sudarshan P representation. However, only Roy J. Glauber was awarded the Nobel prize in 2005 “for his contribution to the quantum theory of optical coherence.”
