This ain’t as silly a question as it sounds. Almost 15 years ago a group at Berkeley raced photons down two tracks of identical length. One track was a straight line through a vacuum; the other was the same except for a barrier that the photons had to tunnel through to reach their destination.
Believe it or not, every time the race was run, the photons that had done the tunnelin came in by a head. That got the Berkeley group a-puzzlin and a-wondrin. The only way they could explain it was if the photons had tunnelled through the barrier at 1.7 times the speed of light. And that’s impossible, right?
A few others repeated the result and before long everybody was a-jumpin and a-clappin at the superluminal speeds they were a-generatin. Never mind relativity which they explained away with some hocus pocus, sayin that only the group velocity of light travels at superluminal speeds and any information carried by the photons was still limited to the speed of light.
Now Herbert “Sherbert” Winful says they go it all wrong. Photons don’t travel faster than light–they ARE light, stoopid!
Instead what causes the quickening is the way that the photons’ energy is stored and then released by the barrier. This introduces a phase change in the photon signal and it is this change, which photons detectors see as an earlier arrival time, that causes the apparent increase in speed.
So there ain’t nothing superluminal about tunnelin after all.
Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0708.3889: Do Single Photons Tunnel Faster than Light?