Date: 19/09/2022 22:00:50
From: ChrispenEvan
ID: 1935065
Subject: Something from Nothing
Yes
Yes
ChrispenEvan said:
https://bigthink.com/starts-with-a-bang/something-from-nothing/interesting enough.
> 70-year-old quantum prediction comes true, as something is created from nothing
Hoyle was right !
(Just kidding.)
> 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.
The Schwinger effect? Ah, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwinger_effect
> 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.
Yes. In the modern universe this has been proposed for magnetars. In the origin of the universe, of course, this is where the universe’s matter came from.
> 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.
Doesn’t sound plausible, but …
I reminds me of the faulty logic – fusion is possible therefore cold fusion exists.
> … the Casimir effect …
Yeah yeah, all that’s old stuff and not directly relevant. Get to the point.
> in 1951, Julian Schwinger, already a co-founder of the quantum field theory that describes electrons and the electromagnetic force, gave a complete theoretical description of how matter could be created from nothing: simply by applying a strong electric field.
> electron–positron pairs are spontaneously created in the presence of an electric field, thereby causing the decay of the electric field.
Note here the statement “electric” field. Not “magnetic” or “electromagnetic”. The OP article says “electromagnetic field”, which is either a typo or an indication of bad science.
> To conserve energy, the electric field loses energy when an electron–positron pair is created, by an amount equal to 2 m_e c^2 , where m_e is the electron rest mass.
> The Schwinger effect has never been observed due to the extremely strong electric-field strengths required. Pair production takes place exponentially slowly when the electric field strength is much below the Schwinger limit, corresponding to approximately 10^18 V/m. With current and planned laser facilities, this is an unfeasibly strong electric-field strength.
Much like I expected.
> In January 2022 researchers at the National Graphene Institute led by Andre Geim and a number of other collaborators reported the observation of an analog process between electron and holes at the Dirac point of a superlattice of graphene on hexagonal boron nitride (G/hBN)
Ah. A physical model ! Much like making a physical model a black hole using water flowing in a channel. Or using a metamaterial as a model of exotic matter. It doesn’t actually tell you anything about the full process, but may lead to insights.
Or to put it another way, this is an analogy.
Yes, interesting.