{{Physicists have uncovered a surprisingly straightforward strategy for turning light into matter.}}<\/p>\n
The design, published in Nature Photonics, adapts technology used in fusion research and can be implemented at existing facilities in the UK.<\/p>\n
Several locations could now enter a race to convert photons into positrons and electrons for the very first time.<\/p>\n
This would prove an 80-year-old theory by Breit and Wheeler, who themselves thought physical proof was impossible.<\/p>\n
Now, according to researchers from Imperial College London, that proof is within reach.<\/p>\n
Prof Steven Rose and his PhD student, Oliver Pike, told media it could happen within a year.<\/p>\n
“With a good experimental team, it should be quite doable,” said Mr Pike.<\/p>\n
If the experiment comes to fruition, it will be the final piece in a puzzle that began in 1905, when Einstein accounted for the photoelectric effect with his model of light as a particle.<\/p>\n
Several other basic interactions between matter and light have been described and subsequently proved by experiment, including Dirac’s 1930 proposal that an electron and its antimatter counterpart, a positron, could be annihilated upon collision to produce two photons.<\/p>\n
Breit and Wheeler’s theoretical prediction of the reverse – that two photons could crash together and produce matter (a positron and an electron) – has been difficult to observe.<\/p>\n
“The reason this is very hard to see in the lab is that you need to throw an awful lot of photons together – because the probability of any two of them interconverting is very low,” Prof Rose explained.<\/p>\n
His team proposes gathering that vast number of very high-energy photons by firing an intense beam of gamma-rays into a further cloud of photons, created within a tiny, gold-lined cylinder.<\/p>\n
That cylinder is called a “hohlraum”, German for “hollow space”, because it contains a vacuum, and it is usually used in nuclear fusion research. The cloud of photons inside it is made from extraordinarily intense X-rays and is about as hot as the Sun.<\/p>\n
BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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