{"id":215459,"date":"2025-06-05T17:05:07","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T22:05:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/physicists-recreate-extreme-quantum-vacuum-effects"},"modified":"2025-06-05T17:05:07","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T22:05:07","slug":"physicists-recreate-extreme-quantum-vacuum-effects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/06\/physicists-recreate-extreme-quantum-vacuum-effects","title":{"rendered":"Physicists recreate extreme quantum vacuum effects"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/physicists-recreate-extreme-quantum-vacuum-effects2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Using advanced computational modeling, a research team led by the University of Oxford, working in partnership with the Instituto Superior T\u00e9cnico at the University of Lisbon, has achieved the first-ever real-time, three-dimensional simulations of how intense laser beams alter the \u201cquantum vacuum\u201d\u2014a state once assumed to be empty, but which quantum physics predicts is full of virtual electron-positron pairs.<\/p>\n<p>Excitingly, these simulations recreate a bizarre phenomenon predicted by <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/quantum+physics\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">quantum physics<\/a>, known as \u201cvacuum four-wave mixing.\u201d This states that the combined electromagnetic field of three focused <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/laser+pulses\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">laser pulses<\/a> can polarize the virtual electron-positron pairs of a vacuum, causing photons to bounce off each other like billiard balls\u2014generating a fourth laser beam in a \u201clight from darkness\u201d process. These events could act as a probe of new physics at extremely high intensities.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is not just an academic curiosity\u2014it is a major step toward experimental confirmation of quantum effects that until now have been mostly theoretical,\u201d said study co-author Professor Peter Norreys, Department of Physics, University of Oxford.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Using advanced computational modeling, a research team led by the University of Oxford, working in partnership with the Instituto Superior T\u00e9cnico at the University of Lisbon, has achieved the first-ever real-time, three-dimensional simulations of how intense laser beams alter the \u201cquantum vacuum\u201d\u2014a state once assumed to be empty, but which quantum physics predicts is full [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1523,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-215459","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215459","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\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=215459"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/215459\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=215459"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=215459"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=215459"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}