In a groundbreaking achievement, scientists have successfully created matter and antimatter directly from light, vividly demonstrating Einstein’s famous equation, E=mc², which shows how energy can be transformed into mass.
This remarkable experiment took place at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Researchers there managed to convert photons (light particles) into pairs of electrons and positrons—essentially turning light into matter and antimatter. This accomplishment fulfills a prediction made by physicists in the 1930s.
How They Did It:
The process involved accelerating gold ions to nearly the speed of light (about 99.995% of light speed) and then colliding them. In these extreme conditions, the energy from the light particles was transformed into electron-positron pairs, providing clear evidence that this conversion can happen directly in a single step. This method simplifies previous approaches, avoiding the additional steps that were necessary in earlier experiments.
Confirming Long-Standing Theories:
The experiment also confirmed a theory known as vacuum birefringence, which suggests that a vacuum can influence light, particularly when a magnetic field is involved. First proposed by physicists in the 1930s, this concept was now observed in a lab for the first time, as the angle of light’s polarization was shown to affect the creation of matter-antimatter pairs.
Daniel Brandenburg, a Goldhaber Fellow at Brookhaven Lab, described this as “clear evidence of direct, one-step creation of matter-antimatter pairs from collisions of light,” validating decades-old predictions.
Not only does this provide a tangible example of Einstein’s equation, but it also opens new avenues for exploring the fundamental interactions between light and matter. The findings were recently published in *Physical Review Letters.
