A conceptual illustration of a glowing pool with blue and orange vortices, representing the measured dark points alongside the honeycomb atomic structure of the hBN material studied. (Courtesy: T Bucher and colleagues) Dark points within light waves can travel faster than the waves themselves. This finding, which is based on new measurements by researchers at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology, confirms a 50-year-old prediction and could help push atomic-scale imaging past its current limits. Formally known as optical phase singularities, dark points are vortices within light waves where the wave’s amplitude drops to zero. “Simply put, these ‘zero points’ are points of complete darkness embedded within the light field,” explains study team member Tomer Bucher . In the 1970s, theoretical studies by the physicists John Nye and Michael Berry suggested that such points could move faster than the waves in which they form.…