Nothing travels faster than the speed of light. That’s the rule. Einstein said so. A century of physics has backed him up. And yet, a team of researchers has demonstrated that certain wave phenomena — specifically, vortices embedded in light and radio pulses — can propagate at velocities exceeding the cosmic speed limit without violating a single law of physics.
This isn’t science fiction. It isn’t a misunderstanding. And it definitely isn’t the kind of claim that should make physicists nervous, even though the phrase “faster than light” tends to set off alarm bells in every physics department on the planet.
The work, published in the journal Physical Review A, comes from a collaboration between researchers at the University of the Basque Country (UPV/EHU) in Spain and several other institutions. As reported by Futurism, the team showed that optical vortices — corkscrew-shaped twists in the phase structure of a light wave — can be engineered to travel faster than the speed of light in a vacuum. The key distinction, and it’s an essential one, is that these superluminal vortices don’t carry information or energy faster than light. They are structural features of a wave, not objects or signals in the traditional sense.
Think of it this way. Imagine you’re sitting on a beach watching waves roll in. The crest of each wave moves toward shore at a certain speed. But the point where two wave crests intersect — a kind of pattern or feature — can sweep along the beach at a speed much faster than either wave. That intersection point isn’t a thing. It’s a geometric consequence. You can’t ride it. You can’t use it to send a message. But it moves fast. Very fast.
The optical vortices in this research operate on a similar principle, though the physics is considerably more sophisticated. Optical vortices are regions within a beam of light where the phase of the electromagnetic field spirals around a central axis, creating what physicists call a phase singularity. At the very center of the vortex, the intensity drops to zero. These structures have been studied for decades in the context of orbital angular momentum of light, and they have practical applications in telecommunications, microscopy, and quantum information science.
What the UPV/EHU team demonstrated is that when you construct a pulse of light carrying such a vortex, and you carefully control the spectral and spatial properties of that pulse, the vortex itself — the dark point at the center, the topological feature — can be made to propagate at superluminal speeds. The group velocity of the pulse’s energy stays at or below the speed of light. The vortex, as a pattern, outruns it.
This matters for several reasons.
First, it forces a more careful conversation about what we mean when we say “speed” in the context of wave physics. There are at least half a dozen different velocities one can define for a wave: phase velocity, group velocity, front velocity, signal velocity, energy velocity, and now, apparently, the velocity of topological features like vortices. Not all of these are subject to the same relativistic constraints. Einstein’s speed limit applies strictly to the propagation of information and causal signals. Phase velocity, for instance, has been known to exceed the speed of light in certain media for over a century. It’s a well-understood phenomenon that doesn’t threaten relativity.
The superluminal vortex velocity falls into this same category of “technically faster than light, but not in a way that lets you build a time machine.” And that distinction, while it might sound like a letdown to the casual reader, is precisely what makes the result interesting to physicists rather than threatening to them.
Second, the finding has potential implications for how structured light is used in practical applications. Optical vortices are already employed in a range of technologies. They’re used to trap and manipulate microscopic particles in optical tweezers. They form the basis of certain quantum communication protocols that encode information in the orbital angular momentum states of photons. They’re central to super-resolution imaging techniques like STED microscopy. Understanding how these vortex structures behave when embedded in pulsed beams — including the surprising fact that they can outpace the light carrying them — could refine how these technologies are designed and deployed.
The researchers also extended their analysis beyond optical frequencies. As Futurism noted, the same principles apply to radio waves and other forms of electromagnetic radiation. A vortex embedded in a radio pulse could, in theory, exhibit the same superluminal behavior. This generality suggests the phenomenon is a fundamental property of wave physics, not something peculiar to a specific frequency range or experimental setup.
So how does this square with Einstein? Perfectly well, it turns out. Special relativity prohibits the superluminal transmission of information — what physicists call “signaling.” If you could send a bit of data from point A to point B faster than light, you could construct scenarios that violate causality: effects preceding causes, messages arriving before they’re sent. That’s the real prohibition. But a vortex sweeping through a beam of light faster than c doesn’t transmit information at that speed. The information content of the pulse is bound up in its energy distribution, which respects the speed limit. The vortex is a shadow, a pattern, a structural artifact. Fast, yes. Dangerous to physics? No.
This isn’t the first time physicists have grappled with superluminal phenomena that don’t actually break relativity. The classic example is the “scissors paradox” — if you have a pair of enormously long scissors and close them, the intersection point of the blades can, in principle, move faster than light. But no material, no energy, and no information moves at that speed. The intersection point is just a mathematical construct. Similarly, the spot of a laser pointer swept quickly across a distant surface can move faster than light. The photons themselves travel at c, but the bright spot — a pattern — can outrun them.
What distinguishes the new vortex research is its rigor and its relevance to real experimental systems. The team didn’t just point out a theoretical curiosity. They developed a formal framework for calculating the velocity of vortex structures in pulsed beams and showed that superluminal propagation arises naturally under specific, experimentally realizable conditions. This is a quantitative result, not a thought experiment.
The broader context here involves a growing body of work on structured light — beams engineered to have complex spatial and temporal profiles. Over the past two decades, the field has expanded enormously. Researchers have created light beams that carry orbital angular momentum, beams with exotic polarization patterns, and so-called “space-time” wave packets that exhibit unusual propagation characteristics. Some of these wave packets have been shown to travel at tunable group velocities — faster or slower than c in free space — again without violating relativity, because the energy and information propagation speeds remain well-behaved.
The vortex velocity result fits neatly into this larger picture. It adds another dimension — literally, a topological one — to the toolkit of structured light. And it raises questions that haven’t been fully answered yet. For instance: what happens to the vortex velocity in dispersive media, where different frequency components travel at different speeds? Can the superluminal behavior be observed directly in experiment, or only inferred from theoretical models? What are the implications for quantum optical systems that use vortex states as information carriers?
These are the kinds of questions that will keep researchers busy for years. But the foundational result is clear. Vortices in light pulses can outrun the light itself. They just can’t carry a message while doing it.
For those of us who grew up in the Midwest watching Star Trek reruns and dreaming about warp drives, there’s something simultaneously thrilling and humbling about results like this. The universe keeps finding ways to be stranger than we expect — and more disciplined than we’d like. Faster than light? Sure. But only in ways that keep the cosmic speed limit firmly intact. Einstein, as usual, gets the last word.
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