Physicists Detect Strongest Evidence Yet of Matter Generated By Collisions of Light

omfglearntoplay shares a report from ScienceAlert: According to theory, if you smash two photons together hard enough, you can generate matter: an electron-positron pair, the conversion of light to mass as per Einstein's theory of special relativity. It's called the Breit-Wheeler process, first laid out by Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler in 1934, and we have very good reason to believe it would work. But direct observation of the pure phenomenon involving just two photons has remained elusive, mainly because the photons need to be extremely energetic (i.e. gamma rays) and we don't have the technology yet to build a gamma-ray laser. Now, physicists at Brookhaven National Laboratory say they've found a way around this stumbling block using the facility's Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) -- resulting in a direct observation of the Breit-Wheeler process in action. The research has been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.