Physicists Designed an Experiment to Turn Light Into Matter
Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:
Plasma could be wrangled to collide photons and yield matter, according to physicists who ran simulations to explore the practical applications of a world-famous equation.
The equation at work here is Einstein's E = mc^2, which establishes a relationship between energy and mass; specifically, the equation holds that energy and mass are equivalent when the latter is multiplied by the speed of light, squared.
A team led by scientists at Osaka University and UC San Diego recently simulated the collisions of photons using lasers; their results suggest that the collisions would yield pairs of electrons and positrons. The positrons-the antiparticle of the electron-could then be accelerated by the laser's electric field to produce a positron beam. Their results are publishedin Physical Review Letters.
We feel that our proposal is experimentally feasible, and we look forward to real-world implementation," said Alexey Arefiev, a physicist at UC San Diego and co-author of the paper, in a University of Osaka release.
The experimental set-up is possible, the release added, at laser intensities that currently exist. The researchers used simulations to test potential experimental set-ups and found a compelling one. The photon-photon collider uses the Breit-Wheeler process to produce matter, meaning it annihilates gamma-rays to produce electron-positron pairs.
[...] This research shows a potential way to explore the mysteries of the universe in a laboratory setting," said Vyacheslav Lukin, a program director at the National Science Foundation, which supported the recent research. The future possibilities at today's and tomorrow's high-power laser facilities just became even more intriguing."
The experiment could provide a way to peer into the universe's composition, by bringing some far-out physics much closer to home. But for that to happen, an experiment will actually need to be built.
Journal Reference:
K. Sugimoto, Y. He, N. Iwata, et al., Positron Generation and Acceleration in a Self-Organized Photon Collider Enabled by an Ultraintense Laser Pulse, Phys. Rev. Lett. 131, 065102 - Published 9 August 2023. https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevLett.131.065102
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