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Do they go faster than light? Do virtual particles contradict relativity or causality?

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Do they go faster than light? Do virtual particles contradict relativity or causality?

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Ralph Siegler

No, the transfer of momentum by virtual photons of the electromagnetic field happens at light speed.    You can’t exchange information (which would include the moving of one of two repelling charges affecting the other) faster than light speed.

 

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In section 2, the virtual photon’s plane wave is seemingly created everywhere in space at once, and destroyed all at once. Therefore, the interaction can happen no matter how far the interacting particles are from each other. Quantum field theory is supposed to properly apply special relativity to quantum mechanics. Yet here we have something that, at least at first glance, isn’t supposed to be possible in special relativity: the virtual photon can go from one interacting particle to the other faster than light! It turns out, if we sum up all possible momenta, that the amplitude for transmission drops as the virtual particle’s final position gets farther and farther outside the light cone, but that’s small consolation. This “superluminal” propagation had better not transmit any information if we are to retain the principle of causality. I’ll give a plausibility argument that it doesn’t in the context of a thought experiment. Let’s try to send information faster than light with a virtua

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