Can We Really Create Matter from Nothing??

We all know that to keep the fire from blowing out, we need to feed it. What we provide, as you already know, is matter. But have you ever thought that if we can make energy from mass, why haven’t we built mass from energy?

Mass and energy form the basis of our Universe. The relationship between them is the most well-known equation in physics, E = mc², that revolutionized how we see the Universe.

This equation is used from households to wars where we saw how even tiny amounts of mass could make a large amount of energy. But today, we are going to see the flip side of this application, i.e. we are going to generate mass from energy. But here we will need a large amount of energy to make a tiny amount of mass.

So some background first…

As we know photons are the quanta of electromagnetic energy, which are quantum “packets” of light, which means if we use 2 photons we can create matter by colliding them. This experiment was done at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Physicists have created pure matter from energy. We know that when a particle and its antiparticle collide, they annihilate, which releases a large amount of energy. If LHS = RHS, then RHS should be equal to LHS. So that means if we take 2 very energetic photons and collide them with each other, they will generate matter, and you guessed it, particle and its anti-particle. This process is known as the Breit-Wheeler process.

So, what’s keeping us from performing this experiment and generating matter. The reason this process is so difficult is that to create matter, we need large amounts of energy in the form of highly energetic gamma rays and we don’t have access to those. Another way around the gamma-ray is to accelerate the particle at high energies in the vacuum inside huge pipes.

Brookhaven National Laboratory did it…

They claimed that they have achieved first the first direct evidence of matter created from light. It requires shooting heavy ions, here they used gold ions, that is they removed the electrons from the gold atom to create a powerful positive charge. Then they accelerated the ions past each other at 99.995 percent of the speed of light. The strong positive charge and extremely high speeds of the ions create a circular magnetic field. So, when the ions are moving close to the speed of light, there are a bunch of photons surrounding the gold nucleus, traveling with it like a cloud. We have two clouds of photons moving in opposite directions with enough energy and intensity that when the two ions graze past each other without colliding, those photon fields can interact.

Although the collision was not detectable, they were able to detect the resulting particle and antiparticle. They claim that they have demonstrated the Breit-Wheeler process but some physicists still argue that the photons used were virtual and hence is not a true demonstration of the process.

Virtual Photons…Umm?

Okay, so virtual photons unlike real photons have a rest mass. Since these highly accelerated ions move close to the speed of light, it creates an electromagnetic field, and inside this electromagnetic field are virtual photons that travel with the cloud. So, the existence of these virtual photons depends on the existence of these electromagnetic fields, that is they exist very briefly. You might be thinking why they chose gold to strip down as ions. One of the reasons was that when scientists were trying to mimic the real photons using virtual photons, particle pairs resulting from the gold ions collision bounced at the same angles as the real particles would do. This means that the particles they were analyzing were behaving as if they were made by a real interaction. And they observed the collision for more than six thousand of those pairs and the angles were consistent with what we’d expect to see from real photons.

At last, all this pursuit of recreating matter from light is also to recreate what was happening at the birth of our universe. We know that matter did arrive and one thing was created from nothing. There is often a variety of reasons why the matter was created, however, perhaps the Breit-Wheeler method will offer us some answers to those queries. But the process can be only truly correct when mankind will develop highly energetic gamma rays lasers.

Author: Shreyans Jain

Shreyans Jain