Due to the association with science-fiction, this is a topic that has been unjustifiably ignored by several entities I have tried to share this theory with. There have not been many experiments attempting to generate a tachyon that I can find publicly and to my knowledge none have been successful. My concept would require a neutrino generator with extremely fine beam control and two skyrmion lattices. I have offered this to the Americans, I have offered this to certain universities, and perhaps they think it's a joke because I never hear back from anyone. Please have an open mind.
The concept combines the already-existing technologies of neutrino generators with skyrmion lattices, which thus far have been described as an information storage technology. I believe skyrmion lattices have an application in tachyon generation.
It is my belief that if we can "skim" neutrinos just above a skyrmion lattice and that this may generate spin in the neutrinos which supports the sustainment of a negative mass state in the particle subsequent to a magneton collision, an effect not as yet observed because non-spinning neutrinos do not resist mass restoration. The device would consist of a neutrino generation phase, a lattice skimming phase, and a magneton collision phase. During the skimming phase, preventing collisions would be critical, and during the collision phase, obviously, collisions would be desired. Lattice #2 would have to be a fraction of a nanometer higher in elevation than the first, and it would have to be shielded to prevent magnetons from colliding prematurely.
The implications are enormous. I understand this is only a hypothesis, but I believe a simple experiment could confirm or disprove the findings and may be worth your while. I've included a simple two-dimensional diagram to help people to understand my idea.
Regards.
Let me see if I am grasping your idea.
If electron neutrinos can conditionally be made to have negative mass, albeit temporarily, they temporarily become tachyons. Then the particle should cease to exist upon colliding with the magneton and should arrive at the detector before the message is sent, temporally speaking, that is. If that's the case, there's no way to actually observe it when it's in the mass inverted state. Eventually, the mass would be theoretically restored and it would then become observable again as a standard 'electron neutrino.' However, if I understand your reasoning correctly and kindly let me know if I've missed the bus, it would be in the past instead of in the present.
Since we already know that coordinated electron spin is what causes magnetism (thus, spin affects behavior) then solitons should have their own spin affecting their behavior and interaction with quarks and other particles. I think it's been hard to see what's going on because of the difficulty inherent in getting two particles that are so small to collide with each other despite the small target area.
However, looking at tachyons, (if they exist) they are said to have a velocity,
v >
c. This means, however that Einstein's important
E is imaginary, at least in their case! If we take the rest mass
m, are we to make it to be imaginary, too? Then
E is negative a real, and
E² −
p² =
m² < 0. Or,
p² −
E² =
M², 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 accelerate (
p goes up) if they lose energy (
E goes down). Therefore, a zero-energy tachyon is "transcendent", therefore it moves infinitely fast. This has profound consequences.
Let's say that there were electrically charged tachyons. Since they would move faster than the speed of light in the vacuum, they should produce Cherenkov* radiation. This would
lower their energy, causing them to accelerate more! In other words, charged tachyons would probably lead to a runaway reaction releasing an arbitrarily large amount of energy. This suggests that coming up with a sensible theory of anything except free (noninteracting) tachyons is likely to be difficult. Heuristically, the problem is that we can get spontaneous creation of tachyon-antitachyon pairs, then do a runaway reaction, making the vacuum unstable. To treat this precisely requires quantum field theory, which gets complicated. It is not easy to summarize results here. For one reasonably modern reference, see
Tachyons, Monopoles, and Related Topics, E. Recami, ed. (North-Holland, Amsterdam, 1978).
But tachyons are not entirely invisible. Imagine that you might produce 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, so far, but no tachyons have been found. Even neutral tachyons can scatter off normal matter with experimentally 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 mechanics 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 tachyons having spin zero, for simplicity. We'll set
c = 1 to keep things less messy. The wavefunction of a single such tachyon can be expected to satisfy the usual equation for spin-zero particles, the Klein-Gordon equation:
(□ + m²)φ = 0
where □ is the D'Alembertian**, which in 3+1 dimensions is just
□ = ∂²/∂t² − ∂²/∂x² − ∂²/∂y² − ∂²/∂z².
The difference with tachyons is that
m² is
negative, and so
m is imaginary.
In order to receive tachyon messages you still have to figure out how to get tachyons to interact with normal matter and electromagnetism. That is a problem with any exotic matter that's not atoms and not electrically charged.
The tachyons analyzed are Bosons. Let's suppose you have a fermion version and your creature is made from that. Fermions affect each other via bosons, which are associated with forces (or more generally, interactions). The exotic material needs to share a charge property with our kind of stuff. E.g. if it was electrically charged, it would interact with atoms via electromagnetic phenomena. It would also release Cherenkov radiation with exponentially increasing energy forever, so that's not good.
Real dark matter candidates and seriously considered un-discovered particles include
WIMPs, which interact via the weak force. So plausibility leads you there as the path of least resistance.
There's always gravity. But detecting a long string or a clump of tiny objects via gravity would be difficult. Maybe anomalies in gravity measurements will lead to their discovery, or other experiments involving the measurement of gravity over short distances will detect them. Maybe the WIMP clouds will be attracted to our apparatus being used to probe for large extra dimensions or make a perfectly reproducible kilogram standard, and these will turn out to be not simple clouds but life.
The bottom line is that you can't use tachyons to send information faster than the 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 or hyper-light speed toward the intended receiver. But you can't have it both ways: localized tachyon disturbances are subluminal and superluminal disturbances*** are nonlocal.
* Cherenkov radiation is
light produced by charged particles when they pass through an optically transparent medium at speeds greater than the
speed of light in that medium. Devices sensitive to this particular form of
radiation, called Cherenkov detectors, have been used extensively to detect the presence of charged
subatomic particles moving at high velocities.
See:
https://www.britannica.com/science/Cherenkov-radiation
** D'Alembertian
in a flat spacetime is defined by:
where
is the speed of light.
The operator usually called the d'Alembertian is also the Laplacian on a flat manifold of Lorentzian signature.
See:
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/dAlembertian.html
*** Superluminal disturbances have been found in the flaring behavior of Quasar 3C 454.3, where three major disturbances propagated down the jet along different trajectories with Lorentz factors**** Γ > 10. The team, including astrophysicist Svetlana G. Jorstad from my other collegiate alma mater, Boston University, infers that the X-ray emission is produced via inverse Compton scattering by relativistic electrons of photons both from within the jet (synchrotron self-Compton) and external to the jet (external Compton, or EC); which one dominates depends on the physical parameters of the jet. A broken power-law model of the γ -ray spectrum reflects a steepening of the synchrotron emission spectrum from near-IR to soft UV wavelengths. They propose that the γ -ray emission is dominated by the EC mechanism, with the sheath of the jet supplying seed photons for γ-ray events that occur near the millimeter-wave core.
See:
https://www.bu.edu/blazars/paperstodownload/jorstad454.pdf
**** Lorentz factors is defined as: γ = 1/√(1-v2/c2) = 1/√(1-β2) = dt/dτ where: v is the relative velocity between inertial reference frames, β is the ratio of v to the speed of light c. τ is the proper time for an observer (measuring time intervals in the observer's own frame), c is the speed of light.
See:
https://www.physicsforums.com/threads/what-does-the-lorentz-factor-actually-mean.649706/
This is great stuff. Are there tachyons and can they be used for communication? James Blish, in his 'Cities in Flight' (Overlook Press, c 2005) far future science fiction series, has his flying cities communicate in real time anywhere in the universe by a similar system he dubs the "Dirac." However, viewing where we are today, I don't think tachyons exist and the problems laid out above, hopefully somewhat clearly, will keep them in science fiction.
Hartmann352
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