LHC Creates Matter from Light
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Scientists on an experiment at the Large Hadron Collider see massive W particles emerging from collisions with electromagnetic fields. How can this happen?
The Large Hadron Collider plays with Albert Einstein's famous equation, E = mc^2, to transform matter into energy and then back into different forms of matter. But on rare occasions, it can skip the first step and collide pure energy-in the form of electromagnetic waves.
[...] This research doesn't just illustrate the central concept governing processes inside the LHC: that energy and matter are two sides of the same coin. It also confirms that at high enough energies, forces that seem separate in our everyday lives-electromagnetism and the weak force-are united.
[...] Inside CERN's accelerator complex, protons are accelerated close to the speed of light. Their normally rounded forms squish along the direction of motion as special relativity supersedes the classical laws of motion for processes taking place at the LHC. The two incoming protons see each other as compressed pancakes accompanied by an equally squeezed electromagnetic field (protons are charged, and all charged particles have an electromagnetic field). The energy of the LHC combined with the length contraction boosts the strength of the protons' electromagnetic fields by a factor of 7500.
When two protons graze each other, their squished electromagnetic fields intersect. These fields skip the classical "amplify" etiquette that applies at low energies and instead follow the rules outlined by quantum electrodynamics. Through these new laws, the two fields can merge and become the "E" in E=mc^2.
[...] The LHC is one of the few places on Earth that can produce and collide energetic photons, and it's the only place where scientists have seen two energetic photons merging and transforming into massive W bosons.
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