Scientists Discover Technique To Turn Light Into Matter

A team of scientists from the Imperial College of London has discovered a technique to turn light into matter, bringing closer to reality a task that was set on paper 80 years ago.

According to the original theory, devised by Gregory Breit and John Archibald Wheeler in 1934, it is theoretically possible to turn light into matter by smashing two photons -- the massless particles of light -- that have extremely high energy to transform them into an electron and a positron, which are particles with mass. And while the theory was thought to be impossible to be physically demonstrated, the new study, published in Nature Photonics, shows for the first time how Breit and Wheeler's theory could be proven in practice.

“What was so surprising to us was the discovery of how we can create matter directly from light using the technology that we have today in the UK,” Steve Rose from the Department of Physics at Imperial College London said in a statement. “As we are theorists we are now talking to others who can use our ideas to undertake this landmark experiment.”

According to scientists, the new experiment would recreate a process that occurred in the first 100 seconds of the universe's creation and is also seen in gamma ray bursts, which are the biggest explosions in the universe and “one of physics' greatest unsolved mysteries.”

The collider experiment that the scientists have proposed involves two key steps. First, the scientists would use an extremely powerful high-intensity laser to speed up electrons to slightly slower than the speed of light. They would then fire these electrons into a slab of gold to create a beam of photons, which could be a billion times more energetic than visible light, shooting in the direction of the radiation chamber. While the electrons would make it through the gold slab, they would all be filtered out from the photons using a magnetic field.

“Although the theory is conceptually simple, it has been very difficult to verify experimentally,” Oliver Pike, the lead researcher of the study, said. “We were able to develop the idea for the collider very quickly, but the experimental design we propose can be carried out with relative ease and with existing technology.”