Scientists have developed an easy way to turn light into matter. This process was considered impossible when it was first proposed 80 years ago.
The proposed experiment, as reported in the journal Nature Photonics, will recreate the events that occurred in the first 100 seconds after the Big Bang. In 1934, scientists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler suggested that light could be transformed into matter, during the collision of two photons, thereby creating an electron and antimatter.
Breit and Wheeler’s calculations were correct, but they never expected anyone to physically prove this hypothesis. “The Breit-Wheeler process is the simplest example of the interaction of light and matter and one of the cleanest demonstrations of E = mc2,” says lead author Oliver Pike from Imperial College in London. "However, the Breit-Wheeler process has never been observed. But such an experiment could well be recreated." The photon collider is able to convert light directly into matter with an extremely powerful high-intensity laser that shoots electrons at the speed of light. This will create a beam of photons that are billions of times more energetic than visible light. The next step is to shoot a high energy laser at the surface of a tiny golden cylinder to create a thermal photon radiation field. The researchers then direct the photon beam, obtained in the first step, through the center of a tiny golden cylinder, causing the photons from two sources to collide, creating electrons and positrons. For the first time, matter was recreated from pure energy in 1997 at the Stanford Center for Linear Accelerators, when a powerful electron beam was directed into a photon beam.
