Quantum principle of relativity and QFT of tachyons

Speaker: Dr. Krzysztof Jodłowski
Affiliation: Center for Theoretical Physics of the Universe, Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Daejeon, Korea
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Abstract: Tachyons have fascinated generations of physicists due to their peculiar behavior, however, they did not solve any actual physics problem. This changed with the recent intriguing work of Dragan and Ekert, who have shown that superluminal observers may be related to the foundations of quantum mechanics since they require introducing non-determinism and wave-like behavior at the fundamental level. In fact, both classical and quantum field theory of tachyons have been constructed. Unfortunately, we will show that the latter theory contains several flaws, which puts the aforementioned program in question. In particular, the Feynman propagator for tachyon, which was adapted from the earlier proposal of Sudarshan et al., is shown to violate unitarity, tachyons violate microcausality, which spoils statistical independence of distant measurements and negatively affects scattering theory (both the non-existent interaction picture approach and the LSZ method), the tachyonic vacuum is likely unstable, and the tachyon field does not satisfy the LSZ asymptotic condition. Our analysis indicates that the quantum tachyon field do not describe a physical on-shell particle with negative mass squared, hence superluminal observers are unphysical and cannot be used to derive QM. Based on 2406.14225 (under review in PRD).

Chairman: Prof. Sławomir Breiter

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