{"id":30554,"date":"2016-09-27T10:49:46","date_gmt":"2016-09-27T17:49:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/creating-antimatter-via-lasers"},"modified":"2017-04-24T19:33:24","modified_gmt":"2017-04-25T02:33:24","slug":"creating-antimatter-via-lasers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2016\/09\/creating-antimatter-via-lasers","title":{"rendered":"Creating antimatter via lasers?"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Now, intriguing calculations from a research team at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAP RAS), and reported this week in Physics of Plasmas<\/em>, from AIP Publishing, explain the production and dynamics of electrons and positrons from ultrahigh-intensity laser-matter interactions. In other words: They\u2019ve calculated how to create matter and antimatter via lasers.<\/p>\n

Strong electric fields cause electrons to undergo huge radiation losses because a significant amount of their energy is converted into gamma rays \u2014 high-energy photons, which are the particles that make up light. The high-energy photons produced by this process interact with the strong laser field and create electron-positron pairs. As a result, a new state of matter emerges: strongly interacting particles, optical fields, and gamma radiation, whose dynamics are governed by the interplay between classical physics phenomena and quantum processes.<\/p>\n

A key concept behind the team\u2019s work is based on the quantum electrodynamics (QED) prediction that \u201ca strong electric field can, generally speaking, \u2018boil the vacuum,\u2019 which is full of \u2018virtual particles,\u2019 such as electron-positron pairs,\u201d explained Igor Kostyukov of IAP RAS. \u201cThe field can convert these types of particles from a virtual state, in which the particles aren\u2019t directly observable, to a real one.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Now, intriguing calculations from a research team at the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAP RAS), and reported this week in Physics of Plasmas, from AIP Publishing, explain the production and dynamics of electrons and positrons from ultrahigh-intensity laser-matter interactions. In other words: They\u2019ve calculated how to create matter and [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":413,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,1617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-30554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-particle-physics","category-quantum-physics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30554","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\/413"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=30554"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49820,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30554\/revisions\/49820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=30554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=30554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=30554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}