"FASTER-THAN-C PROPAGATION EFFECTS AND THEIR POSSIBLE APPLICATIONS"
Recent manifestations of apparently faster-than-light
effects, including the Princeton NEC experiment, and our earlier electronic
circuit and photon tunneling experiments, will be reviewed. Special
relativity does not forbid the group velocity from exceeding c. Moreover,
the causality principle does not forbid seemingly anti-causal negative
group delays of analytic signals. For example, in electronic circuits,
we have observed that the peak of an output pulse leaves the exit port
of a circuit BEFORE the peak of the input pulse enters the entrance port.
Furthermore, under these circumstances, the group velocity dispersion and
the dispersion in the group delay can both vanish, so that pulse distortion
for these "superluminal" analytic signals can be negligible both in optics
and in electronics. Examples will be given, and some applications,
such as speeding up computers, will be discussed.