Superpowered Chinese Lasers Could Soon Rip Open Raw Vacuum [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

By Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | January 29, 2018 05:06pm ET

Physicists are getting close to building lasers powerful enough to rip matter out of a vacuum.

According to a report published Jan. 24 in the journal Science, a team of Chinese scientists is getting ready to start construction this year on a 100-petawatt laser in Shanghai known as the Station of Extreme Light, or SEL. That puts them at the front of a wide field of scientists around the world who are working to realize a prediction published in the journal Physical Review Letters in 2010 by a team of American and French physicists that a sufficiently powerful laser could cause electrons to appear out of a vacuum.

It might seem weird to imagine that electrons could appear out of empty space. But it makes a lot more sense in light of a strange claim of quantum electrodynamics: "Empty" space isn't empty at all, but rather is made up of densely packed pairs of matter and antimatter. Those pairs tightly fill up the gaps between everything, quantum electrodynamics states — they just don't interact in any noticeable way with the rest of the universe, because they cancel one another out. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]

So it's easier to consider that the Chinese laser won't so much create matter, as cause it to enter the world humans can perceive. Its powerful pulses of energy will cause electrons to separate from their antimatter twins, positrons, in ways researchers can detect.

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