Scientists Generate Matter Directly From Light – Physics Phenomena Predicted More Than 80 Years Ago

Abstract Energy Concept

Abstract energy concept illustration.

Collisions of Light Produce Matter and Antimatter From Pure Energy

Study demonstrates a long-predicted process for generating matter directly from light — plus evidence that magnetism can bend polarized photons along different paths in a vacuum.

Scientists studying particle collisions at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)—a U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science user facility for nuclear physics research at DOE’s Brookhaven National Laboratory—have produced definitive evidence for two physics phenomena predicted more than 80 years ago. The results were derived from a detailed analysis of more than 6,000 pairs of electrons and positrons produced in glancing particle collisions at RHIC and are published in Physical Review Letters.

The primary finding is that pairs of electrons and positrons—particles of matter and antimatter—can be created directly by colliding very energetic photons, which are quantum “packets” of light. This conversion of energetic light into matter is a direct consequence of Einstein’s famous E=mc2 equation, which states that energy and matter (or mass) are interchangeable. Nuclear reactions in the sun and at nuclear power plants regularly convert matter into energy. Now scientists have converted light energy directly into matter in a single step.

Making Matter From Light

Making matter from light: Two gold (Au) ions (red) move in opposite direction at 99.995% of the speed of light (v, for velocity, = approximately c, the speed of light). As the ions pass one another without colliding, two photons (?) from the electromagnetic cloud surrounding the ions can interact with each other to create a matter-antimatter pair: an electron (e-) and positron (e+). Credit: Brookhaven Natioinal Laboratory

The second result shows that the path of light traveling through a magnetic field in a vacuum bends differently depending on how that light is polarized. Such polarization-dependent deflection (known as birefringence) occurs when light travels through certain materials. (This effect is similar to the way wavelength-dependent deflection splits white light into rainbows.) But this is the first demonstration of polarization-dependent light-bending in a vacuum.

Both results depend on the ability of RHIC’s STAR detector—the Solenoid Tracker at RHIC—to measure the angular distribution of particles produced in glancing collisions of gold ions moving at nearly the speed of light.

Colliding clouds of photons

Such capabilities didn’t exist when physicists Gregory Breit and John A. Wheeler first described the hypothetical possibility of colliding light particles to create pairs of electrons and their antimatter counterparts, known as positrons, in 1934.

“In their paper, Breit and Wheeler already realized this is almost impossible to do,” said Brookhaven Lab physicist Zhangbu Xu, a member of RHIC’s STAR Collaboration. “Lasers didn’t even exist yet! But Breit and Wheeler proposed an alternative: accelerating heavy ions. And their alternative is exactly what we are doing at RHIC.”

An ion is essentially a naked atom, stripped of its electrons. A gold ion, with 79 protons, carries a powerful positive charge. Accelerating such a charged heavy ion to very high speeds generates a powerful magnetic field that spirals around the speeding particle as it travels—like current flowing through a wire.

STAR Detector

The STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider measured the angular distribution of particles produced in glancing collisions of gold ions moving at nearly the speed of light to provide evidence for two physics phenomena predicted more than 80 years ago. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

“If the speed is high enough, the strength of the circular magnetic field can be equal to the strength of the perpendicular electric field,” Xu said. And that arrangement of perpendicular electric and magnetic fields of equal strength is exactly what a photon is—a quantized “particle” of light. “So, when the ions are moving close to the speed of light, there are a bunch of photons surrounding the gold nucleus, traveling with it like a cloud.”

At RHIC, scientists accelerate gold ions to 99.995% of the speed of light in two accelerator rings.

“We have two clouds of photons moving in opposite directions with enough energy and intensity that when the two ions graze past each other without colliding, those photon fields can interact,” Xu said.

STAR physicists tracked the interactions and looked for the predicted electron-positron pairs.

But such particle pairs can be created by a range of processes at RHIC, including through “virtual” photons, a state of photon that exists briefly and carries an effective mass. To be sure the matter-antimatter pairs were coming from real photons, scientists have to demonstrate that the contribution of “virtual” photons does not change the outcome of the experiment.

To do that, the STAR scientists analyzed the angular distribution patterns of each electron relative to its partner positron. These patterns differ for pairs produced by real photon interactions versus virtual photons.

“We also measured all the energy, mass distributions, and quantum numbers of the systems. They are consistent with theory calculations for what would happen with real photons,” said Daniel Brandenburg, a Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven Lab, who analyzed the STAR data on this discovery.

Other scientists have tried to create electron-positron pairs from collisions of light using powerful lasers—focused beams of intense light. But the individual photons within those intense beams don’t have enough energy yet, Brandenburg said.

One experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in 1997 succeeded by using a nonlinear process. Scientists there first had to boost the energy of the photons in one laser beam by colliding it with a powerful electron beam. Collisions of the boosted photons with multiple photons simultaneously in an enormous electromagnetic field created by another laser produced matter and antimatter.

“Our results provide clear evidence of direct, one-step creation of matter-antimatter pairs from collisions of light as originally predicted by Breit and Wheeler,” Brandenburg said. “Thanks to RHIC’s high-energy heavy ion beam and the STAR detector’s large acceptance and precision measurements, we are able to analyze all the kinematic distributions with high statistics to determine that the experimental results are indeed consistent with real photon collisions.”

Bending light in a vacuum

STAR’s ability to measure the tiny deflections of electrons and positrons produced almost back-to-back in these events also gave the physicists a way to study how light particles interact with the powerful magnetic fields generated by the accelerated ions.

“The cloud of photons surrounding the gold ions in one of RHIC’s beams is shooting into the strong circular magnetic field produced by the accelerated ions in the other gold beam,” said Chi Yang, a long-time STAR collaborator from Shandong University who spent his entire career studying electron-positron pairs produced from various processes at RHIC. “Looking at the distribution of particles that come out tells us how polarized light interacts with the magnetic field.”

Bending Polarized Light

Bending polarized light: This illustration shows how light with different polarization directions (indicated by black arrows) passes through a material along two different paths (yellow beams). This is called the birefringence effect. Results from RHIC provide evidence that birefringence also happens in a magnetic field in a vacuum. Credit: Brookhaven National Laboratory

Werner Heisenberg and Hans Heinrich Euler in 1936, and John Toll in the 1950s, predicted that a vacuum of empty space could be polarized by a powerful magnetic field and that such a polarized vacuum should deflect the paths of photons depending on photon polarization. Toll, in his thesis, also detailed how light absorption by a magnetic field depends on polarization and its connection to the refractive index of light in a vacuum. This polarization-dependent deflection, or birefringence, has been observed in many types of crystals. There was also a recent report of the light coming from a neutron star bending this way, presumably because of its interactions with the star’s magnetic field. But no Earth-based experiment has detected birefringence in a vacuum.

At RHIC, the scientists measured how the polarization of the light affected whether the light was “absorbed” by the magnetic field.

This is similar to the way polarized sunglasses block certain rays from passing through if they don’t match the polarization of the lenses, Yang explained. In the case of the sunglasses, in addition to seeing less light get through, you could, in principle, measure an increase in the temperature of the lens material as it absorbs the energy of the blocked light. At RHIC, the absorbed light energy is what creates the electron-positron pairs.

“When we look at the products produced by photon-photon interactions at RHIC, we see that the angular distribution of the products depends on the angle of the polarization of the light. This indicates that the absorption (or passing) of light depends on its polarization,” Yang said.

This is the first Earth-based experimental observation that polarization affects the interactions of light with the magnetic field in the vacuum—the vacuum birefringence predicted in 1936.

“Both of these findings build on predictions made by some of the great physicists in the early 20th century,” said Frank Geurts, a professor at Rice University, whose team built and operated the state-of-the-art “Time-of-Flight” detector components of STAR that were necessary for this measurement. “They are based on fundamental measurements made possible only recently with the technologies and analysis techniques we have developed at RHIC.”

Reference: “Measurement of e+e- Momentum and Angular Distributions from Linearly Polarized Photon Collisions” by J. Adam et al. (STAR Collaboration), 27 July 2021, Physical Review Letters.
DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.127.052302

Additional contributors to the analyses that led to these results include STAR co-spokesperson Lijuan Ruan of Brookhaven, Shuai Yang of Rice University, Janet Seger of Creighton University, and Wangmei Zha of the University of Science and Technology of China. The scientists made use of computational resources at Brookhaven’s Scientific Data and Computing Center, the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at DOE’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, and the Open Science Grid consortium.

Brookhaven Lab’s role in the work and operations at RHIC are supported by the DOE Office of Science (NP). Additional funders include the U.S. National Science Foundation and a range of international agencies listed in the published paper.

9 Comments on "Scientists Generate Matter Directly From Light – Physics Phenomena Predicted More Than 80 Years Ago"

  1. … Matter and Antimatter From Pure Energy this is interesting, but is there symmetry in the amount of matter and antimatter?
    This is like very great thing…

  2. Checkout my book antimatter explained here https://www.fuion.net

  3. Needless to say, stars turn electron positron collisions into gamma rays to +ve beta decay protons into higher mass neutrons during the collision of proton pairs forming deuterons all the time. A positron and neutrino is released when the deuteron forms. Half of all the hydrogen in a star must first be converted to neutrons to make the deuterons or heavy hydrogen. These are then fused with other protons into He3 and those into He4 releasing energy.

    It happens slowly in smaller stars in the pp process but in larger stars with carbon as a catalyst can occur 10,000 times more rapidly in the CNO cycle.

    It also occurs on earth under certain conditions in lightning when atmospheric nitrogen or N14 is converted to heavier C14. One of the nitrogen’s protons receives enough energy from gamma radiation to +ve beta decay into a neutron also releasing a positron and neutrino. This was covered in the science press recently when lightning in Japan was shown to produce gamma ray bursts and new C14.

  4. adolfo del castillo | July 31, 2021 at 6:58 pm | Reply

    THOUGHTS ON THE “BIG BANG” THEORY AS TO THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE.
    I HAVE LONG HELD DEEP DOUBTS AS TO THE BIG BANG BEING THE BIRTH OF THE UNIVERSE.
    THIS IS THE FIRST TIME I HAVE THE TEMERITY TO QUESTION SO CENTRAL A TENENT OF SO
    BASIC AND IMPORTANT A SUBJECT AS THE BIRTH OF OUR UNIVERSE.
    BUT HERE GOES. THE BIG BANG WAS AN EXPLOSION. THAT IS NOT QUESTIONED. THE FIRST QUESTION I HAVE
    IS WHAT CAUSED THE EXPLOSION? I HAVE NEVER HEARD A GOOD, CREDIBLE EXPLANATION OF WHAT CAUSED
    SUCH A MONUMENTAL EXPLOSION TO OCCUR. THE SECOND QUESTION THAT COMES TO MIND IS WHAT
    WAS THERE BEFORE THE EXPLOSION. WERE THE ELEMENTS THAT CAME TOGETHER IDIOPATHIC (meaning arising from within)
    or OF EXTERNAL SOURCE? WAS THERE A TRIGERING CAUSE OR EVENT THAT CAUSED THE EXPLOSION? IF SO, WHAT WAS IT?
    NEXT QUESTION IS WHETHER THE EXPLODING ELEMENTS WERE GASEOUS OR SOLID MATTER? IF GASEOUS, WHAT
    WAS THE DEMENTIONS OF THE GASES? SCIENTIFICALLY, THEN WHAT WOULD BE THE MINIMUM DIMENTIONS
    OF THE GASEOUS MASS TO CAUSE SUCH A CATACLYSMIC EXPLOSION?
    IF THE EXPLODING ELEMENTS WERE SOLID MATTER WHAT WOULD BE THE SIZE AND WEIGHT, IE MASS,
    OF THE EXPLODING MATTER? IF EINSTEIN’S EQUASION WERE APPLIED TO THE EXPLOSION, WHAT
    WOULD BE THE VALUES FOR “E” AND FOR “M” USING THE SPEED OF LIGHT AS THE CONSTANT?
    BASED ON THE FACTS AND EVENTS FOUND AT THE SOURCE OF THE ‘BIG BANG” HOW DO WE EXPLAIN
    THE FACT OF THE INCRESING VELOCITY OF THE CELESTIAL BODIES SPEEDING AWAY FROM THE SOURCE
    EXPLOSION? HAS THE RATE OF THE INCREASING VELOCITY BEEN ASCERTAINED AND IF SO WHAT IS THE
    PRESENT DAY VELOCITY OF MATTER IN THE UNIVERSE?
    HAVE THE ABOVE QUESTIONS BEEN SEPARATELY ADDRESSED FOR “DARK ENERGY ” AND “DARK MATTER”?
    IF SO, WHAT DIFFERENT VALUES HAVE BEEN DETERMINED? OUR PLANET EARTH IS PART OF OUTER SPACE.
    WHAT HOLDS IT IN ITS ORBIT AROUND THE SUN? WHAT HOLDS THE SUN IN ITS ORBIT? WHAT FORCES
    HOLD OUR GALAXY TOGETHER? WHAT FORCE HOLDS THE PLANETS IN THEIR ORBITS WITHIN OUR
    GALAXY. DOES DARK ENERGY AND OR DARK MATTER PLAY A ROLE IN HOLDING OUR GALAXY
    TOGETHER? WHAT ROLE DOES THE POLARITY OF THE SUB-ATOMIC PARTICLES PLAY IN THE FORMATION
    OF MATTER FROM ENERGY? WE THINK OF GRAVITY AS PULLING DOWN WHEN ACTUALLY IT PULLS IN ALL
    DIRECTION IN OUTER SPACE, OR IN THE DIRECTION OF NEARBY LARGER SPACE BODIES OF GREATER MASS.
    Adolfo del Castillo
    7-30-2021 FINALLY EINSTEIN’S EQUIVALENCE EQUASION PROVEN IN REALITY AS MORE THAN A THEORY.
    Scientists Generate Matter Directly From Light – Physics Phenomena Predicted More Than 80 Years Ago (scitechdaily.com)

    • Read a recent book on physics in a book store or library or Wikipedia, preferably one written in lower caps.

      It probably won’t convince you of much but it might shed light on some matters. Current reckoning is that only hydrogen, helium and tiny amounts of lithium and heavy hydrogen came out of the rapid cooldown. All other elements were made in the stars that came later. Look for the creation of elements by nuclear genesis. There is a special periodic table of elements that labels every element by which path it came to be. Many elements come from several methods of production, 6 methods are currently known. A tiny number such as Technicium and the very heavy radioactives after plutonium are only man made since they have halflives of the blink of an eye.

  5. Concerned Citizen | August 2, 2021 at 6:23 am | Reply

    I suppose this data has already been shared with China based on the name of the scientist.

  6. first of all, the equation m=E/v^2 (widely known as E=mc^2) is directly pointing out mass and matter is not the same thing
    second of all, you cannot turn energy into mass or mass into energy just because both is the same
    mass is a property of energy and the universe isn’t an alchemy

  7. Mary Christopher | October 6, 2023 at 6:56 pm | Reply

    Would like to Subscribe, but your Subscribe button doesn’t seem to be working.

  8. It’s amusing to witness the “discoveries” by modern “psy-en-tists” for “psy-ence”. The alchemists of old could have told all of the modern-day scientists how things work, but no one wants to lend credit to the past and the discoveries that have already been made. All knowledge is right here, right now, but it’s fascinating to see how it changes names for each era. The old world spoke of The Ether; modern world calls it “quantum”. Old alchemy and “magic” would tell you we don’t need high tech and robotics to manifest straight from the Ether; we can manifest it with our minds, because the Ether is malleable to thoughts, which are electromagnetic light waves. This has been proven in labs, but modern “psy-ence” doesn’t want to explore the mind/body/spirit as One unit; it poo poos the notion of spirit at all, leaving a compartmentalized, fragmented, stripped down version from what our holographic dreamstate truly is: a magical world of creation and destruction, set into motion from our magical minds that are connected to all things in existence. For example, The Secret Life of Plants experiments, Dr. Masaru Emoto’s water experiments, and Marcel Vogel’s crystal technology experiments all prove that our minds are also a powerful tool in the actions of this reality. Mainstream “psy-ence” doesn’t give any credibility to this fact that has been touched upon by professionals in various scientific fields. The more we join together in thoughts, the more easily we co-create directly from the Ether. Ask any Tibetan monk or Indian guru; the mind manifests through the Will or intent.

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