FTL Currents May Power Pulsar Beams

thomst passes along news out of the recent AAAS meeting of a new explanation for pulsar beams that involves faster-than-light currents. Here are Los Alamos's press release and three related papers on the arXiv. "The new model explains the beam emissions from pulsars as products of superluminal currents within the spinning neutron stars' atmospheres. According to the authors' model, the current generated is, itself, faster than light, although the particles that compose it never individually exceed the universal speed limit, thereby preventing Einsteinian post-mortem rotation. The new model is a general explanation of the phenomenon of pulsar beam emissions that explains emissions at all observed frequencies (and different pulsars emit everything from radio waves to x-rays), which no previous model has done."

Comments

FTL Information?

[ZeroSumHappiness]

Can we replicate this and add information to the current to transport information faster than the speed of light? (The real problem.)

Re:FTL Information?

[Chris Burke]

Can we replicate this and add information to the current to transport information faster than the speed of light? (The real problem.)

Well I'm going to say no simply based on the fact that they are claiming no physical laws are being broken and that Special Relativity is not violated, since super-luminal information transfer = time travel = causality violation = impossible in SR. This not the first time this effect has been proposed and it has apparently been studied in labs, so if it was a possible way to transmit information, it seems they would have probably figured that out by now and at least some aspect of SR (perhaps causality!) would have to be scrapped.

I don't fully understand what they're talking about, but it sounds like a similar phenomenon to group velocity, in which some aspect of the wavefront can be said to be traveling faster than light, but nevertheless real photons and information cannot.

Re:You know what else creates FTL currents?

[IorDMUX]

The spots won't be moving faster than light, they will actually be a blur or line spread across the surfaces they hit.

You're confusing perception with reality, and they are two very different things.

I think the GP was right, any you may have it backwards. The human eye will perceive a blur or line, due to the limited "frame refresh" and averaging of our optical system. In reality, though, the "spot", as defined by the location where the photons are hitting/reflecting from the surface, will be traveling faster than light. No information can be conveyed, however, as no point on this surface can directly use this phenomenon to actually communicate anything faster than light.