Researchers have finally found a way to turn light into matter, almost 80 years after the concept's inception.
In 1934, two scientists - Gregory Breit and John Wheeler first came up with the idea of turning pure light into matter. According to them, matter could be created from light by smashing two photons to create an electron and a positron. Unfortunately, the lack of infrastructure and technology led to the idea remaining just a dream. Now, almost 80 years since the theory's inception, researchers from Imperial College London have detected a way to may this theory a reality.
Using new equipment in the form of an extremely powerful high-intensity laser capable of speeding up electrons to just below the speed of light, researchers were able to prove how Breit and Wheeler's "photon-photon collider" theory can actually be a reality.
Professor Steve Rose from Imperial College said that although the creation of matter was possible, the end result may not to visible to the naked eye, at least not at this stage.
"Despite all physicists accepting the theory to be true, when Breit and Wheeler first proposed the theory, they said that they never expected it be shown in the laboratory. Today, nearly 80 years later, we prove them wrong," Rose said in a press statement. "What was so surprising to us was the discovery of how we can create matter directly from light using the technology that we have today in the UK. As we are theorists we are now talking to others who can use our ideas to undertake this landmark experiment."
Rose and his team discovered that Breit and Wheeler's theory could actually be put to use during a study where they were investigating unrelated problems in fusion energy.
Breit-Wheeler theory will reportedly constitute the final piece that fits into a physics puzzle which determines the simplest way to transform pure light into matter. The other pieces include Dirac's 1930 theory on the annihilation of electrons and positrons and Einstein's 1905 theory on the photoelectric effect.
The Process
The first step included using an extremely powerful high intensity laser to fire electrons at almost the speed of light into a slab of gold. This created photons that were a billion times more energetic than visible light.
The next step included firing separate high energy laser onto the surface of a tiny gold cylinder called a vacuum hohlraum. This process created a thermal radiation field of photons. The researchers would then direct the photon beam from the gold slab through the centre of the hohlraum, causing the photons from the two sources to collide and create electrons and positrons, which could be detected as they beamed out of the device.
Matter was first created out of pure energy in 1997 at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Centre when a powerful electron beam was fired into a laser beam of photons. Occasionally, an electron collided with a photon pushing it into other photons with enough force to produce an electron and a positron.
"There was not enough energy at Stanford to observe the Breit-Wheeler process, instead a much more complex process was observed - high-energy photons interacted with multiple low-energy photons in a strong laser field," study's lead author Oliver Pike of Imperial College London said, according toDaily Mail. "In our work, there are no massive particles [electrons] present. Our scheme would therefore represent the first proof-of-principle of a pure photon-photon collider."
Associate Professor Martin Sevior, an experimental particle physicist at the University of Melbourne, said that the best part of this new method of creating matter was that it wouldn't require as high energy electron beams as those used by Stanford.
"The Stanford experiment used the world's most intense and highest energy electron beam. This new system will work with a much lower energy electron beam, and it has a much greater photon yield for the same amount of energy," Sevior said, according to ABC News. "This will help scientists study how photon-to-photon interactions actually work, and study the details of the theory of quantum electrodynamics."
The study was funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the John Adams Institute for Accelerator Science, and the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE). Findings were published online in Nature Photonics.
