Technion physicists film 'dark points' in light waves moving faster than light

A team led by Professor Ido Kaminer of the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology reported in Nature on 25 March 2026 that it had directly measured tiny 'dark points' inside light waves and watched them move faster than the speed of light. The paper, titled Superluminal correlations in ensembles of optical phase singularities, involved 19 authors from 11 institutions, with the Technion as lead affiliation alongside partners including Bar-Ilan University, MIT, Harvard, Stanford and the Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics.

Dark points, or phase singularities, are spots within a wave where its amplitude drops to exactly zero, forming miniature vortices around which the wave swirls. Theorists predicted in the 1970s that such points could travel faster than light. Because they have no mass and carry neither energy nor information, this would not violate Einstein's rule that nothing physical can exceed the speed of light, but it had never been observed directly.

To see them, the researchers built a custom instrument at the Technion's electron microscopy centre that combines a laser system and an opto-mechanical setup inside an electron microscope. They studied waves travelling through hexagonal boron nitride, a material in which light couples to vibrations of the crystal to form so-called polaritons that move about a hundred times more slowly than light in a vacuum. Within these slow waves the vortices raced ahead faster than light itself. The team, which included doctoral students Tomer Bucher and Alexey Gorlach and Dr. Michael Yannai, also developed a new electron interferometry method that sharpens images of nanoscale motion.

Kaminer said the results reveal universal laws shared by many kinds of waves, from sound and fluid flows to superconductors. The researchers expect the techniques to aid microscopy, nanoscale optics, superconductivity research and efforts to encode quantum information in materials.