Recent studies reveal that matter and antimatter can be created from light particles and energy, as reported in Physical Review Letters (photons). Thus, it serves as a stunning physical illustration of the world’s most famous equation, E=mc2.
According to Einstein’s equation, energy (E) is equal to the product of mass (m) and the square of the speed of light (c). The research demonstrated that the Department of Energy’s Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Laboratory can convert pairs of electrons and positrons, which are formed of matter, into light particles, which are made of energy (matter being that which has mass). Positrons are precisely an example of antimatter, yet antimatter has the same energy and mass.
The matter-antimatter pairs were created by researchers using gold ion beams. To create positively charged ions, they took gold atoms and removed all of their electrons. They then fired the ions at one another at a high rate of speed (99.995 percent the speed of light, or roughly 186,000 miles per second).
Although a comparable discovery was made at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 1997, the process was more difficult and required more steps at that time. This finding is “strong proof of direct, one-step synthesis of matter-antimatter couples from collisions of light,” according to Daniel Brandenburg, a Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven Lab, just as Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler predicted in the 20th century.
Additionally, the research validates an earlier notion regarding how polarized photons interact with vacuums in empty space. Werner Heisenberg, Hans Heinrich Euler, and John Toll were among the 20th-century scientists who believed that polarized photons would be forced out of a vacuum of empty space if the vacuum itself was polarized.
Vacuum birefringence has never been observed in an experiment on Earth previously.
The vacuum and magnetic field both block and absorb particular wavelengths of light, similar to how polarized sunglasses do. This light is transformed into electron and positron pairs.
Because “the angular distribution of the electron-positron pairs relies on the angle of polarization of the light,” researchers were able to establish this connection. This demonstrates that how light is polarized influences whether it is absorbed or let through, according to Chi Yang, a STAR colleague from Shandong University.
