Did Scientists just break the speed of light barrier?

Scientists working in a US government laboratory say they have managed to transmit a signal from point to point faster than the speed of light in a vacuum - in a development apparently violating the laws of physics.

researchers at the US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), who have been trying to exploit a loophole in the rule, that could see something travel faster than light. That thing is information, and the loophole relies on forcing one pulse to propagate through a second one. If the second pulse is moving at a speed close to the speed of light, it should in theory be possible to make the first one travel faster than the speed of light.

But now a new and potentially usable refinement known as "four wave mixing" has been developed. The NIST boffins describe their new process like this:

In four-wave mixing, researchers send 200-nanosecond-long "seed" pulses of laser light into a heated cell containing atomic rubidium vapor along with a separate "pump" beam at a different frequency from the seed pulses. The vapor amplifies the seed pulse and shifts its peak forward so that it becomes superluminal. At the same time, photons from the inserted beams interact with the vapor to generate a second pulse, called the "conjugate" because of its mathematical relationship to the seed. Its peak, too, can travel faster or slower depending on how the laser is tuned and the conditions inside the laser.

[link to www.theregister.co.uk]

and their papers [link to prl.aps.org]

So the barrier to sending information FTL may be broken.

wow