Günter Nimtz

Günter Nimtz (born 22 September 1936) is a German physicist, working at the 2nd Physics Institute at the University of Cologne in Germany. He has investigated narrow-gap semiconductors and liquid crystals. His claims show that particles may travel faster than the speed of light when undergoing quantum tunneling.

Academic career Günter Nimtz studied Electrical Engineering in Mannheim and Physics at the University of Heidelberg. He graduated from the University of Vienna and became a professor of physics at the University of Cologne in 1983. During 1977 he was a research associate for teaching and researching at McGill University, Montreal/Canada. He achieved emeritus status in 2001. During 2004 he was Visiting Professor at the University of Shanghai and of the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications. From 2001 to 2008 he was teaching and doing fundamental research at the University of Koblenz-Landau.

Industrial research and development Anechoic electromagnetic chamber with the novel nano-metalfilm pyramidal absorbers on the walls. A Porsche is under an electromagnetic compatibility test.

In 1993 Günter Nimtz and Achim Enders invented a novel absorber for electromagnetic anechoic chambers. It is based on a 10 nanometer -thick metal film placed on an incombustible pyramidal carrier. At the Merck Company in Darmstadt Nimtz designed an apparatus for the production of ceramic aerosols.

Experiments related to superluminal quantum tunneling Nimtz and his coauthors have been investigating superliminal quantum tunneling since 1992. Their experiment involved microwaves either being sent across two space-separated prisms or through frequency-filtered waveguides. In the latter case either an additional undersized waveguide or a reflective grating structure had been used. In 1994 Nimtz and Horst Aichmann They won the first prize of Rheinland-Pfalz and the Heraeus Prize of Germany.

Diagram of the Nimtz and Stahlhofen double prism experiment. Photons can be detected behind the right-hand prism until the gap exceeds up to about one meter. Wavelength was 33 mm.

Alfons Stahlhofen and Nimtz described an experiment which sent a beam of microwaves towards a pair of prisms. The angle provided for total internal reflection and setting up an evanescent wave. Because the second prism was close to the first prism, some light leaked across that gap. The transmitted and reflected waves arrived at detectors at the same time, despite the transmitted light having also traversed the distance of the gap. This is the basis for the assertion of faster-than-c transmission of information.

Nimtz and coworkers asserted that the measured tunneling time is spent at the barrier front, whereas inside the barrier zero time is spent. Zero time tunneling was already calculated by several theoreticians, notion is used together with relativistic wave equations for the wavefunction.

Scientific opponents and their interpretations Chris Lee has stated that there is no new physics involved here, and that the apparent faster-than-c transmission can be explained by carefully considering how the time of arrival is measured (whether the group velocity or some other measure). Recent papers by Herbert Winful point out errors in Nimtz' interpretation. These articles propose that Nimtz has provided a rather trivial experimental confirmation for General Relativity. Winful says that there is nothing specifically quantum-mechanical about Nimtz's experiment, that in fact the results agree with the predictions of classical electromagnetism (Maxwell's equations), and that in one of his papers on tunneling through undersized waveguides Nimtz himself had written "Therefore microwave tunneling, i.e. the propagation of guided evanescent modes, can be described to an extremely high degree of accuracy by a theory based on Maxwell's equations and on phase time approach." Herbert Winful argues that the train analogy is a variant of the "reshaping argument" for superluminal tunneling velocities, but he goes on to say that this argument is not actually supported by experiment or simulations, which actually show that the transmitted pulse has the same length and shape as the incident pulse. This becomes obvious wrong in a standing wave guide set-up at frequencies below the cut-off frequency.

Apart from these strange interpretations further authors have published papers arguing that quantum tunneling does not violate the relativistic notion of causality, and that Nimtz's experiments (which are argued to be purely classical in nature) don't violate it either. Some oppositional theoretical interpretations have been published. and that tunneling is the one and only observed violation of special relativity. However - in contradiction to their opponents - they explicitly point out that this does not lead to a violation of primitive causality: Due to the temporal extent of any kind of signal it is impossible to transport information into the past. After all they claim that tunneling can generally be explained with virtual photons, the strange particles introduced by Richard Feynman and shown for evanescent modes by Ali and by Cargnilia and Mandel. In that sense it is common to calculate the imaginary tunneling wave number with the Helmholtz and the Schrödinger equations as Günter Nimtz However, Nimtz highlights that eventually the final tunneling time was always obtained by the Wigner phase time approach. points out that tunneling indeed confronts special relativity and that any other statement must be considered incorrect. All waves have a zero tunneling time. and the barrier can be seen as a timeless macroscopic space. Winfuls tunneling model is not correct. Recently it was proven in several experiments with photonic and Schrödinger wave packets that all waves have a zero tunneling time. Again, though, other physicists believe that tunneling experiments in which particles appear to spend anomalously short times inside the barrier are in fact fully compatible with relativity,

This claimed zero tunnel time for electrons is in apparent contrast with the known fact that quantum tunneling is a completely subluminal effect (namely, it is consistent with the standard notion of relativistic causality Nimtz has written in more detail on signals and the described interpretation of the FTL tunneling experiments.

Although his experimental results have been well documented since the early 1990s, Günter Nimtz' interpretation of the implications of these results represents a highly debated topic, which numerous researchers consider as incorrect (see above, #Scientific opponents and their interpretations). Some oppositional studies on zero time tunneling have been published. The common descriptions of FTL-tunneling signals presented in most textbooks and articles are corrected into final conclusions according to Brillouin and other important physicists.

Selected works

Aichmann, H., & Nimtz, G. (2014). On the traversal time of barriers. Foundations of Physics, 44(6), 678-688. Nimtz, G., & Aichmann, H. (2015). Zero time tunneling: macroscopic experiments with virtual particles. In EPJ Web of Conferences (Vol. 95, p. 04044). EDP Sciences G. Nimtz, H. Aichmann: All waves have a zero tunneling time, Z. Naturforscher 76 (4)a, 295 (2021)

Nimtz, G.,Aichmann, H. (2024). On time and space in potential barriers, Int. J. of Engineering and Science Invention (IJESI), 13 (11), ISSN(Online) 2319-6734 Nimtz, G.,Aichmann, H. (2025.) Illusion of space and time in 1-dimension, Int. J. of Engineering and Science Invention (IJESI), 14 (11), ISSN(Online) 2319-6734 Nimtz, G.,Aichmann, H. (2026). What has Entanglement in common with Tunneling?, Int. J. of Engineering and Science Invention (IJESI), 15 (1), ISSN(Online) 2319-6734