 The physicists Günter Nimtz and Alfons Stahlhofen, of the University of Cologne, claim to have violated relativity experimentally by transmitting photons faster than the speed of light.They say they have conducted an experiment in which microwave photons — relatively low-energy packets of light — travelled "instantaneously" between a pair of prisms that had been moved up to apart.Their experiment involved an optical phenomenon known as "evanescent modes", and they claim that since evanescent modes have an imaginary wave number, they represent a "mathematical analogy" to quantum tunnelling.