UK discovery ‘starts race’ to turn light into matter
Physicists have uncovered a surprisingly straightforward strategy for turning light into matter.
The design, published in Nature Photonics, adapts technology used in fusion research and can be implemented at existing facilities in the UK.
Several locations could now enter a race to convert photons into positrons and electrons for the very first time.
This would prove an 80-year-old theory by Breit and Wheeler, who themselves thought physical proof was impossible.
Now, according to researchers from Imperial College London, that proof is within reach.
Prof Steven Rose and his PhD student, Oliver Pike, told the BBC it could happen within a year.
“With a good experimental team, it should be quite doable,” said Mr Pike.
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.
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.