Matter/Antimatter from the Vacuum

Centauri Dreams ^ | 12/10/10 | Paul Gilster

[LibWhacker]

If possible, this would be the most important discovery of all time (and that's the understatement of all time).

[allmost]

This is not new. Matter/anti-matter particle fluctuations are a fairly mainstream understanding of ‘vacuum’. They need to be paired as such so energy is conserved. Some postulate that the entire Universe is one such fluctuation.

[the invisib1e hand]

Matter/Antimatter from the Vacuum

Where else would it be?

[LibWhacker]

Never heard the Dirac quote before: That we live in an dense sea of particles and antiparticles, or that we could pull them out at will. Goodbye energy woes and goodbye to the need for a really good propulsion method that’d get us to the stars.

[dhs12345]

Are the new particles created from the photons... conservation of energy/mass from E = m * c^2?

[dhs12345]

My vacuum gets a lot of matter in it. Have to empty it every time.

[LibWhacker]

So far all the antimatter we have has been made in particle colliders. So pulling it out of nothing would be a neat trick.

[Flightdeck]

I think the energy would come from what was previously the zero-point energy of the empty space (sometimes called vacuum energy). The theory is that even empty space (without even photons passing through) has a whole bunch of energy associated with it, but kind of equal and opposite, so it doesn’t seem to.

[Pyro7480]

[LibWhacker]

Not from the photons per se. Rather the laser is used to free matter and antimatter from the quantum stew we’ve all heard so much about.

[allmost]

The concept is decades old. Casimir et al were exploring this theoretically in the first half of last century. Pulling real world usage out of random quantum fluctuations can no doubt be done, the random nature of the wavelengths/position/time/etc make it extremely difficult to convert to classical 'work'.

[UCANSEE2]

[blasater1960]

Thats right...Tom Bearden et al.

Engery From the Vacuum

[aruanan]

So nothing consists of unresolved somethings and everything consists of refracted nothing.

[count-your-change]

I think it’s been known for some time that the electron is really a fuzzy spot of energy that as we probe deeper into it we discover a cloud of virtual particles that makes us wonder if there is really an electron or just a motley collection of particles waiting to be expressed.

[dhs12345]

Something from nothing?

Or maybe a vacuum is not “nothing?” Space is actually made of “ether” after all.

[LibWhacker]

No, there's nothing new about the quantum stew, but this is new work, just written up in Physical Review Letters describing a way to separate out matter and antimatter from the vacuum.

[dhs12345]

However, the law of conservation has to still apply, doesn't it? So, if you are producing more matter than you started with, then the extra matter has to come from somewhere.

Fundamental law: you don't get nothin' for free.

[dhs12345]

Fuzzy is a descriptive. Is it a particle or a wave and Heisenberg?

[allmost]

The amount of energy required to agitate the vacuum condition is enormous. Even with harnessing the virtual photons at relatively high efficiency, it seems like a power loss.