{"id":125335,"date":"2021-07-23T02:23:10","date_gmt":"2021-07-23T09:23:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/antimatter-from-laser-pincers"},"modified":"2021-07-23T02:23:10","modified_gmt":"2021-07-23T09:23:10","slug":"antimatter-from-laser-pincers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/antimatter-from-laser-pincers","title":{"rendered":"Antimatter from laser pincers"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In the depths of space, there are celestial bodies where extreme conditions prevail: Rapidly rotating neutron stars generate super-strong magnetic fields. And black holes, with their enormous gravitational pull, can cause huge, energetic jets of matter to shoot out into space. An international physics team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now proposed a new concept that could allow some of these extreme processes to be studied in the laboratory in the future: A special setup of two high-intensity laser beams could create conditions similar to those found near neutron stars. In the discovered process, an antimatter jet is generated and accelerated very efficiently. The experts present their concept in the journal <em>Communications Physics<\/em>.<\/p>\n<p>The basis of the new concept is a tiny block of plastic, crisscrossed by micrometer-fine channels. It acts as a target for two lasers. These simultaneously fire ultra-strong pulses at the block, one from the right, the other from the left \u2014 the block is literally taken by laser pincers. \u201cWhen the laser pulses penetrate the sample, each of them accelerates a cloud of extremely fast electrons,\u201d explains HZDR physicist Toma Toncian. \u201cThese two electron clouds then race toward each other with full force, interacting with the laser propagating in the opposite direction.\u201d The following collision is so violent that it produces an extremely large number of gamma quanta \u2014 light particles with an energy even higher than that of X-rays.<\/p>\n<p>The swarm of gamma quanta is so dense that the light particles inevitably collide with each other. And then something crazy happens: According to Einstein\u2019s famous formula E=mc2, light energy can transform into matter. In this case, mainly electron-positron pairs should be created. Positrons are the antiparticles of electrons. What makes this process special is that \u201cvery strong magnetic fields accompany it,\u201d describes project leader Alexey Arefiev, a physicist at the University of California at San Diego. \u201cThese magnetic fields can focus the positrons into a beam and accelerate them strongly.\u201d In numbers: Over a distance of just 50 micrometers, the particles should reach an energy of one gigaelectronvolt (GeV) \u2014 a size that usually requires a full-grown particle accelerator.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the depths of space, there are celestial bodies where extreme conditions prevail: Rapidly rotating neutron stars generate super-strong magnetic fields. And black holes, with their enormous gravitational pull, can cause huge, energetic jets of matter to shoot out into space. An international physics team with the participation of the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) has now [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[33,48],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-125335","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cosmology","category-particle-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125335","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=125335"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/125335\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=125335"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=125335"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=125335"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}