E=mc2: Can We Turn Energy Into Matter?

"How a group of scientists pieced together an 80-year old puzzle involving the inter-conversion of energy and matter, and what gold has to do with the theory of special relativity"

              

E=m (c squared) Einstein's theory of special relativity triumphs again!

ALBERT EINSTEIN proposed the most famous equation in Physics in a 1905 paper on Special Relativity.

Essentially, the equation says that mass and energy are intimately related. Atom bombs and nuclear reactors are practical examples of the formula working in one direction, turning matter into energy.

But until now there has been no way to do the reverse, turn energy into matter. What makes it particularly hard is that c² term, the speed of light squared. It accounts for the huge amounts of energy released in nuclear reactions, and the huge amount you’d need to inject, in order to turn energy into matter.

In the past, researchers have tried showing that matter can be made from light. But, these tests often failed because  all these required the additional presence of massive, high-energy particles, or required more than seven photons to create a pair of electrons and positron. Clearly a very complex process!

But scientists at Imperial College London (including a visiting physicist from Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics) think they’ve figured out how to turn energy directly into matter. 

SLAC National Laboratory Accelerator

The possibility of doing something like this was suggested in 1934 by two American physicists, Dr. Gregory Breit and Dr. John A. Wheeler. But more than six decades passed before any laboratory could pump enough power into colliding beams of radiation to conjure up matter from nothingness. 

“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,” said Professor Rose. “Today, nearly 80 years later, we prove them wrong.” 

THE TRAILBLAZING EXPERIMENT

The proposed theoretical design (Nature Photonics, Pike et al)

The collider experiment that the scientists have proposed involves two key steps.

The first step would be to accelerate electrons with a high-energy laser to just below the speed of light (300,000km/s) and smash them into a slab of gold, which would create a beam of light a billion times more intense than the light from the Sun.

This would be aimed into a hollow gold shell called a hohlraum (German for empty room). The shell would be excited by another laser to create a thermal radiation field that emits light akin to starlight.

When the two sources of light cross, some will collide and create electrons and their corresponding antimatter particles, positrons, which could be detected as they left the hohlraum. They calculate that the experiment should produce 100,000 pairs of particles.

THIS experiment has huge implications, not only does it yet again prove an aspect of Einstein’s theories, it recreates a process that was important in the first 100 seconds of the universe and that is also seen in gamma ray bursts, which are the biggest explosions in the universe. What is more striking is that according to Oliver Pike, the chief researcher, all "the technology that this requires is already available".

Nebula

“I think people will seriously start to have a crack at this,” Sir Peter Knight, a physicist and emeritus professor at Imperial, told the BBC.

After all, the ingredients are right here.

#For more information on this, check out Oliver Pike and his team's article in Nature Photonics