Photo: bnl.gov
STAR detector at the relativistic heavy ion collider RHIC
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New research has demonstrated the long-predicted process of generating matter directly from light.
With the help of the STAR detector at the US Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory, physicists have obtained convincing evidence of two physical phenomena predicted more than 80 years ago: the formation of matter directly from light and the fact that magnetism can bend polarized photons in a vacuum. The results of the study were published in the journal Physical Review Letters. Eurekalert.
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The essence of the discovery is that pairs of electrons and positrons – particles of matter and antimatter – can be created directly by the collision of very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light.
This transformation of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2, which says that energy and matter, or mass, are interchangeable.
Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy back into matter in one step directly.
The second result shows that the path of light passing through a magnetic field in a vacuum bends differently depending on how the light is polarized. This polarization-dependent deflection, known as birefringence, occurs when light passes through certain materials.
Both results were achieved thanks to the ability of the RHIC STAR detector to measure the angular distribution of particles produced by grazing collisions of gold ions moving at almost the speed of light.
In 1934, when physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler first described the hypothetical possibility of light particles colliding to form pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterparts known as positrons, such possibilities did not exist.
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