Transmission of Information in Non-Local Field Theories

The signaling between two observers in 3+1 dimensional flat spacetime coupled locally to a non-local field is considered. We show that in the case where two observers are purely timelike related – so that an exchange of on-shell massless quanta cannot occur – signaling is still possible because of a violation of Huygens’ principle. In particular, we show that the signaling is exponentially suppressed by the non-locality scale. Furthermore, we consider the case in which the two observers are light-like related and show that the non-local modification to the local result is polynomially suppressed in the non-locality scale. This may have implications for phenomenological tests of non-local theories.