Saturday, September 17

Something is Created from Nothing




















There are all sorts of conservation laws in the Universe: for energy, momentum, charge, and more. Many properties of all physical systems are conserved: where things cannot be created or destroyed.

We've learned how to create matter under specific, explicit conditions: by colliding two quanta together at high enough energies so that equal amounts of matter and antimatter can emerge, so long as E = mc² allows it to happen.

For the first time, we've managed to create particles without any collisions or precursor particles at all: through strong electromagnetic fields and the Schwinger effect. 

HERE's HOW...

Whoever said, “You can’t get something from nothing” must never have learned quantum physics. As long as you have empty space — the ultimate in physical nothingness — simply manipulating it in the right way will inevitably cause something to emerge. Collide two particles in the abyss of empty space, and sometimes additional particle-antiparticle pairs emerge. 

Take a meson and try to rip the quark away from the antiquark, and a new set of particle-antiparticle pairs will get pulled out of the empty space between them. And in theory, a strong enough electromagnetic field can rip particles and antiparticles out of the vacuum itself, even without any initial particles or antiparticles at all.

Previously, it was thought that the highest particle energies of all would be needed to produce these effects: the kind only obtainable at high-energy particle physics experiments or in extreme astrophysical environments. But in early 2022, strong enough electric fields were created in a simple laboratory setup leveraging the unique properties of graphene, enabling the spontaneous creation of particle-antiparticle pairs from nothing at all. 

The prediction that this should be possible is 70 years old: dating back to one of the founders of quantum field theory, Julian Schwinger. The Schwinger effect is now verified, and teaches us how the Universe truly makes something from nothing.  READ MORE...

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