7/5/2023 0 Comments What is matter made of![]() The first step fires electrons at a slab of gold to produce a beam of high-energy photons. Writing in the journal Nature Photonics, the scientists describe how they could turn light into matter through a number of separate steps. "The Breit-Wheeler process is the simplest way matter can be made from light and one of the purest demonstrations of E=mc 2," he said. Oliver Pike, the lead researcher on the study, said the process was one of the most elegant demonstrations of Einstein's famous relationship that shows matter and energy are interchangeable currencies. In their study, the physicists noted that the process was so rare and hard to produce that it would be "hopeless to try to observe the pair formation in laboratory experiments". Electrons are particles of matter that form the outer shells of atoms in the everyday objects around us.īut Breit and Wheeler had no expectations that their theory would be proved any time soon. They worked out that – very rarely – two particles of light, or photons, could combine to produce an electron and its antimatter equivalent, a positron. The original idea was written down by two US physicists, Gregory Breit and John Wheeler, in 1934. The kind of matter they aim to make comes in the form of subatomic particles invisible to the naked eye. ![]() The scientists are not on the verge of a machine that can create everyday objects from a sudden blast of laser energy. ![]() ![]() "If you do this experiment, you will be taking light and turning it into matter." "We have shown in principle how you can make matter from light," said Steven Rose at Imperial. But in a report published on Sunday, physicists at Imperial College London claim to have cracked the problem using high-powered lasers and other equipment now available to scientists. ![]()
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