A photon, a neutrino (if it has zero rest mass) move at $c$ but what about charged particles? If the answer is no, is there a fundamental reason or just because of the radiation it emits?
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1ISRT the answer is: No, because anything with rest mass requires infinite energy to accelerate to c, and infinite energy isn't available. – shieldfoss Jun 28 '13 at 21:51
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1AIUI, in the unbroken SU(2) X U(1) electroweak theory, the charged vector bosons would propagate at $c$. – Alfred Centauri Jun 28 '13 at 22:11
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1Related: http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7905/ – Alfred Centauri Jun 29 '13 at 00:26
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It's not impossible in principle to have a charged particle with no mass, but there is no known particle that is both charged and massless. Consequently, all charged particles are required to travel at some speed less than $c$. Note, however, that electrons at LHC energies are so excited that they functionally are travelling at $c$, since their energies are in GeV, and their rest mass is half of a MeV. It is in fact common in many particle physics calculations to ignore the electron mass, since doing this introduces errors smaller than the dominant sources of error in the problem.
Zo the Relativist
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