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In case you do not realize it, photons are tiny pieces of light. In fact, they are as light as possible. When you light a lamp, a huge number of photons shoot out of that light bulb and slap you in the eyes, where they are absorbed by your retina and turned into an electrical signal allowing you to see what you are doing.
So you can imagine how many photons surround you at a time. Not only from the lights of your room, but photons also through the sun window. Even your own body generates photons, but up to the level of infrared energy, so you need night vision goggles to see them. But they are still there.
And, of course, all the radio waves, the ultraviolet rays and all the other rays are constantly bombarding you and everything else from an uninterrupted flow of photons.
It's photons everywhere.
These small packets of light are not supposed to interact with each other, having essentially no "consciousness" that others exist even. The laws of physics are such that one photon passes just in front of another with zero interaction. [The 18 Biggest Unsolved Mysteries in Physics]
That's what physicists thought, at least. But in a new experiment inside the world's most powerful atom destroyer, researchers have had a glimpse of the impossible: photons colliding with each other. The catch? These photons were a bit out of their game, which meant that they did not behave as themselves but had temporarily become "virtual". By studying these super-rare interactions, physicists hope to reveal some of the fundamental properties of light and perhaps even discover new high-energy physics, such as grandiose theories and (perhaps) supersymmetry.
A light touch
Generally, it is good that photons do not interact or bounce against each other, as it would act as a total madhouse with photons never moving in any sort of a straight line. So, fortunately, two photons will simply slip one over the other as if the other one did not even exist.
That's most of the time.
In high energy experiments, we can (with a lot of elbow grease) cause two photons to collide, although this happens very rarely. Physicists are interested in this type of process because it reveals some very deep properties of the very nature of light and could help to discover unexpected physical phenomena. [18 Times Quantum Particles Blew Our Minds]
Photons very rarely interact with each other because they only connect with electrically charged particles. It's just one of those rules of the universe that we have to live with. But if this is the rule of the universe, then how could we ever have two photons, which have no charge, to connect?
When a photon is not
The answer lies in one of the most impenetrable and most delicious aspects of modern physics, and it bears the awesome name of quantum electrodynamics.
In this image of the subatomic world, the photon is not necessarily a photon. At least, it's not always a photon. Particles, like electrons and photons, and all the other elements – are constantly turning around, changing identity as they move. At first this seems confusing: how, for example, can a beam of light be anything other than a beam of light?
In order to understand this delusional behavior, we need to widen our consciousness a bit (to borrow an expression).
In the case of photons, when they travel from time to time (and keep in mind that this is extremely, extremely rare), you can change your mind. And instead of being a simple photon, it can become a pair of particles, a negatively charged electron and a positively charged positron (the antimatter partner of the electron), traveling together.
Blink your eyes and you will miss it, because the positron and the electron will meet and, as happens when matter and antimatter meet, they annihilate, poof. The odd pair will become a photon again.
For various reasons that are too complicated to enter now, when that happens, these pairs are called virtual particles. Suffice to say that in almost all cases, you never interact with virtual particles (in this case, the positron and the electron), and you can never speak that to the photon.
But not in all cases.
A light in the dark
In a series of experiments conducted by the ATLAS collaboration at the Large Hadron Collider located under the Swiss-French border and recently submitted to the online preprinting newspaper arXiv, the team has spent far too much time sneaking past at almost the speed of light. . However, they did not let the lead particles hit each other; instead, the pieces came very, very, very, very close. [Photos: The World’s Largest Atom Smasher (LHC)]
In this way, instead of having to deal with a gigantic collision disorder, including many particles, forces and additional energies, the lead atoms simply interacted via the electromagnetic force. In other words, they just swapped a lot of photons.
And from time to time – extremely, incredibly rarely – one of these photons was briefly transformed into a pair consisting of a positron and an electron; then another photon would see one of these positrons or electrons and talk to him. An interaction would occur.
Now in this interaction, the photon collides with the electron or positron and goes away happily without damage. Finally, this positron or electron finds its partner and becomes a photon, so that two photons colliding only give two photons that bounce one on the other. But the fact that they were able to talk to each other is remarkable.
How remarkable? Well, after billions and billions of collisions, the team detected a grand total of 59 potential intersections. Only 59.
But what do these 59 interactions tell us about the universe? On the one hand, they validate this image that a photon is not always a photon.
And by deepening the very quantum nature of these particles, we could learn a new physics. For example, in some sophisticated models that push the boundaries of known particle physics, these photon interactions occur at slightly different speeds, which potentially gives us a way to explore and test these patterns. At the present time, we do not have enough data to distinguish the differences between these models. But now that the technique is established, we could make some progress.
And you're going to have to apologize for the very obvious closure game here, but hopefully soon we'll be able to clear up the situation.
Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at State University of Ohio, host of "Ask an astronaut" andSpace Radio,"and author of"Your place in the universe. "
Originally posted on Live Science.
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