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Physicists believe they have created a simple design for turning pure light into matter. They just need to find someone to do it.

A team from Imperial College London developed the design while working on inertial confinement fusion energy. In their work, the team routinely uses something called a hohlraum, a hollow gold cylindrical shell. No one had thought it might be the key to making an 80-year-old theory come to life: the 1934 proposal by US physicists Gregory Breit and John Wheeler that two particles of light known as photons could be smashed together to form an electron and a positron. "We smash particles inside the hohlraum with a powerful laser and that generates lots of x-rays," Oliver Pike, lead author on a paper describing the design in Nature Photonics, explains to Wired.co.uk. "You have hydrogen in there and it implodes to high temperatures and you get fusion. We work on this day in and day out. We're aware of the conditions these lasers can produce, and I guess separate to that we've just always thought the idea of photon collider was something quite cool. We weren't looking till we realised you could put a few things together and they would work really well together."


Pike describes the original 80-year-old theory as "conceptually simple". It had been regarded as an accurate and almost certainly correct theory, but no one has been able to ever test it. "Other approaches people have used in the past to study this area of particle physics involved smashing two beams together -- that doesn't really work for this," says Pike. "The laws of nature are against you, the beams don't have the right energy. No one had thought about using the hohlraum for anything but fusion, and it really hadn't been thought of as a tool for fundamental physics. We just needed someone to put the two together."

And that is exactly what the Imperial College team did, with the help of a visiting theoretical physicist from the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics. Hohlraum in place, they could propose a design for a new type of photon-photon collider, whereby a high-intensity laser is used to speed up electrons, which are then fired into a slab of gold. This creates a beam of photons with energy around a billion times that of visible light. High-energy laser beams are then fired into the hohlraum, creating a high temperature radiation field. The photon beam from the first part of the experiment is sent through the centre of the hohlraum and finally the photons collide to create matter as they exit the cylinder.

Now the theory has been published, the Imperial College team is talking with various partners to get the experiment started. In the UK, the Atomic Weapons Establishment's Orion laser would be suitable (there, it's used to research the kinds of massive events that occur during nuclear explosions), and in upstate New York the Omega laser at the University of Rochester would also work. "Beyond that there are a good handful of other lasers we could apply this to."


Pike and his team are clearly proud of the development, and itching to see what further research it will lead to. For instance, he describes gamma ray bursts as "one of the biggest mysteries in astrophysics", and the photon collider could be used to replicate this on a miniature scale, or elements of it at least. "Everyone we talked to thought this was quite a cool thing,"

Pike tells us. "It's a very simple concept to grasp, and a lot of people we told the idea to scratched their heads and said 'I'm sure I've heard that kind of thing before'. But no one has been able to find anything to suggest this has been thought of before."

All going well, Pike is hopeful that we could be making matter from pure light "in 12 months time". "Now it's just probably a case of sorting out the finer details, matching numbers to specific lasers and getting time in these massive facilities."