Historical research guide · 1024 · 2007

FTL Quantum Models of the Photon and the Electron

Richard F. Gauthier

In one minute

Richard Gauthier takes a question most people never think to ask — what is a photon actually doing, and what is an electron actually made of? — and answers it with a shape. In his model a photon is a single uncharged quantum running along an open corkscrew at 1.414 times the speed of light, the corkscrew’s radius set by the wavelength. An electron is the same thing closed into a loop: a charged pointlike quantum circling roughly 250 billion billion times a second around a double-looped helix whose pitch is one Compton wavelength. Because that quantum carries energy and momentum but no rest mass of its own, nothing forbids it from going faster than light, and in Gauthier’s geometry it does so 57 percent of the time and travels slower the rest, passing through exactly the speed of light twice in every cycle. The trajectory’s parameters are chosen so that the loop reproduces the electron’s measured spin and magnetic moment, and its two handednesses give the electron and the positron.

Connection

Chapter 2 asks what the vacuum and the particles moving through it actually are, and this is a concrete geometric answer — matter as light tied into a closed loop. Chapter 13 is where the site keeps the attempts at one picture underneath energy, inertia and travel, and Gauthier’s is unusual in tying the electron’s inertia to a momentum that never stops circulating.

From the source

The photon is modelled as an uncharged superluminal quantum moving at 1.414 times the speed of light along an open helical trajectory inclined at 45 degrees, with a helix radius equal to the wavelength divided by two pi — so the helical pitch of the corkscrew is the wavelength itself.Abstract, first sentence
The electron is modelled as a charged pointlike quantum circulating at about 2.5 times 10 to the 20 hertz in a closed, double-looped helical trajectory whose helical pitch is one Compton wavelength, Planck’s constant divided by the electron mass times the speed of light.Abstract, second sentence
The move that makes the speed permissible is stated plainly: the circulating quantum has energy and momentum but no rest mass, so its speed is not limited by the speed of light. In the electron’s rest frame it runs superluminal 57 percent of the time and subluminal 43 percent, passing through exactly the speed of light twice in each cycle, with a maximum of 2.515 times the speed of light and a minimum of 0.707 times it.Abstract, third to fifth sentences
The model is pinned to measured quantities rather than left free: the helical trajectory parameters are selected to produce the electron’s spin of one half h-bar, its magnetic moment to the Bohr magneton without the small quantum-electrodynamic corrections, and the Dirac equation’s jittery motion — the Zitterbewegung — at its standard angular frequency of twice the rest energy over h-bar, its amplitude of half a reduced Compton wavelength, and its internal speed of exactly the speed of light.Abstract, sixth sentence
The two possible helicities of the model correspond to the electron and the positron, and the unifying statement of the paper follows: with these models, an electron is like a closed circulating photon. Matter, in this picture, is light that has been tied into a loop.Abstract, seventh and eighth sentences
The proposal Gauthier attaches to it is about inertia: the electron’s inertia is related to the circulating internal Compton momentum of the model, which he calls momentum at rest — mass as motion that has been closed on itself rather than as a substance. What to watch is the payoff he names in the last sentence: the internal superluminality of the photon model, the mixed superluminality and subluminality of the electron model, and that account of inertia could be relevant to mechanisms of superluminal communication and transportation. The measurement that would open the question is any experiment sensitive to structure inside the electron at the Compton scale.Abstract, ninth and closing sentences

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1063/1.2437555

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. The paper is held closed by AIP as AIP Conference Proceedings volume 880, pages 1099 to 1108, in the proceedings of the Space Technology and Applications International Forum, STAIF 2007, Albuquerque. On 2026-09-08 no open copy was found: OpenAlex, Unpaywall and Semantic Scholar all report open access status closed with no repository location, Crossref carries no licence statement of any kind, the author’s own domain did not resolve and has no captures in the Wayback index, and a viXra author listing refused the request. The status was raised from summary-only to abstract-only because the author’s own complete abstract is carried by the AIP deposit; that abstract is reproduced below and the summary and every claim are written from it, which is why each locator says Abstract. TEXT FIDELITY. The deposited abstract flattened its exponents (2.5 x 1020 hz for 2.5 times 10 to the 20 hertz, and 2mc2 for twice the rest energy); those two exponents are restored here so the numbers read correctly, and nothing else is altered. The deposit also carries four typographic corruptions of its own — hehcal for helical, sThe for The, superluminalily and superluminahty for superluminality — which are left exactly as the publisher has them rather than silently corrected. AUTHOR. Richard F. Gauthier; no affiliation is asserted here because no publisher record consulted gives one.

How to cite it

Richard F. Gauthier (2007) FTL Quantum Models of the Photon and the Electron doi:10.1063/1.2437555

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