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Tachyon

A tachyon (pronounced /ˈtækiˌɒn/; Greek: ταχύς, takhus, "swift" + English: -on "elementary particle") is a hypothetical subatomic particle that travels faster than the speed of light. The first description of tachyons is attributed to German physicist Arnold Sommerfeld; however, it was George Sudarshan[citation needed], Olexa-Myron Bilaniuk, Vijay Deshpande and Gerald Feinberg (who originally coined the term in the 1960s) that advanced a theoretical framework for their study. Tachyonic fields have appeared theoretically in a variety of contexts, such as the bosonic string theory. In the language of special relativity, a tachyon is a particle with space-like four-momentum and imaginary proper time. A tachyon is constrained to the space-like portion of the energy-momentum graph. Therefore, it cannot slow down to subluminal speeds. Even if tachyons were conventional, localizable particles, they would still preserve the basic tenets of causality in special relativity and not allow transmission of information faster than light,contrary to what has been written in many works of science fiction.

Today, in the framework of quantum field theory, tachyons are best understood as signifying an instability of the system and treated using tachyon condensation, rather than as real faster-than-light particles, and such instabilities are described by tachyonic fields. According to the contemporary and widely accepted understanding of the concept of a particle, tachyon particles are too unstable to be treated as existent. By that theory, faster than light information transmission and causality violation with tachyons are impossible on both grounds: they are non-existent in the first place (by tachyon condensation) and even if they existed they wouldn't be able to transmit information (by Feinberg's analysis).Despite the theoretical arguments against the existence of tachyon particles, experimental searches have been conducted to test the assumption against their existence; however, no experimental evidence for or against the existence of tachyon particles has been found.
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