Use a very strong electric field to turn virtual particles into "real" particles

[William Gaatjes]

As a bit of an amateur enthusiast, i read this article about positrons and electrons appearing inside thunder clouds, but these did not dissappear again creating bright flashes of gamma rays, at least not immediately. Inside thunderclouds enormous electrical fields exist. And i read in another article that when an electrical field is strong enough, virtual particles at the right spot can be forced to separate from each other because of their opposite electrical charge and continue to exist for a short time. The idea is that virtual particles come to existence in pairs and annihilate each other again, this all happening constantly but in a very short time. But a strong enough electrical field can force them away and keep them in existence , electrons aways from positrons. This idea has been proposed by physists since the 1930 i just found out. And had to think about the article with the thunderclouds with positrons emissions.
Can this really be happening that a zone, a kind of natural well can exist when given the right circumstances inside thunderclouds where positrons do not get a chance to meet electrons for an amount of time ? Seems to me that the electrical field inside the cloud discharges and that then the positrons hit electrons and the annihilation starts, the emission of gamma rays.
Millions of volts can be generated inside thunder clouds.

http://phys.org/news/2015-05-physicist-mysterious-anti-electron-clouds-thunderstorm.html

A terrifying few moments flying into the top of an active thunderstorm in a research aircraft has led to an unexpected discovery that could help explain the longstanding mystery of how lightning gets initiated inside a thunderstorm.
University of New Hampshire physicist Joseph Dwyer and lightning science colleagues from the University of California at Santa Cruz and Florida Tech describe the turbulent encounter and discovery in a paper to be published in the Journal of Plasma Physics.
In August 2009, Dwyer and colleagues were aboard a National Center for Atmospheric Research Gulfstream V when it inadvertently flew into the extremely violent thunderstorm—and, it turned out, through a large cloud of positrons, the antimatter opposite of electrons, that should not have been there.
To encounter a cloud of positrons without other associated physical phenomena such as energetic gamma-ray emissions was completely unexpected, thoroughly perplexing and contrary to currently understood physics.
"The fact that, apparently out of nowhere, the number of positrons around us suddenly increased by more than a factor of 10 and formed a cloud around the aircraft is very hard to understand. We really have no good explanation for it," says Dwyer, a lightning expert and the UNH Peter T. Paul Chair in Space Sciences at the Institute for the Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space.
It is known that thunderstorms can sometimes make flashes of energetic gamma rays, which may produce pairs of electrons and positrons when they interact with air. But the appearance of positrons should then coincide with a large increase in the number of gamma rays.
"We should have seen bright gamma-ray emissions along with the positrons," Dwyer says. "But in our observations, we first saw a positron cloud, then another positron cloud about seven kilometers away and then we saw a bright gamma-ray glow afterwards. So it's all not making a whole lot of sense."
Adds coauthor David Smith of the UC Santa Cruz, "We expected the thunderstorm to make some forms of radiation but not this. We don't even know whether it's something nature can do on its own or only happens when you toss an airplane into the mix."
The physical world is filled with normal matter and antimatter. For every normal particle there's an antiparticle, such as an electron and its associated anti-particle, called the positron, which, when brought together, annihilate each other in a flash of gamma rays. It is, Dwyer points out, the very same process that is supposed to power Star Trek's Starship Enterprise.
Having boldly gone where few people should, Dwyer says the experience inside the belly of the beast provides further insight into the bizarre and largely unknown world of thunderstorms—an alien world of gamma rays, high-energy particles accelerated to nearly the speed of light and strange clouds of antimatter positrons.
One possible explanation for the sudden appearance of positrons is that the aircraft itself dramatically influenced the electrical environment of the thunderstorm but that, Dwyer says, would be very surprising. It's also possible the researchers were detecting a kind of exotic electrical discharge inside the thunderstorm that involves positrons.
"This is the idea of 'dark lightning,' which makes a lot of positrons," says Dwyer. "In detecting the positrons, it's possible we were seeing sort of the fingerprint of dark lightning. It's possible, but none of the explanations are totally satisfying."
Dark lightning is an exotic type of electrical discharge within thunderstorms and is an alternative to normal lightning. In dark lightning, high-energy particles are accelerated and produce positrons, which help discharge the electric field.
Says Dwyer, "We really don't understand how lightning gets started very well because we don't understand the electrical environment of thunderstorms. This positron phenomenon could be telling us something new about how thunderstorms charge up and make lightning, but our finding definitely complicates things because it doesn't fit into the picture that was developing."

http://www.newscientist.com/article...make-virtual-particles-real.html#.VVuGgkYa-Uk

Next-generation lasers will have the power to create matter by capturing ghostly particles that, according to quantum mechanics, permeate seemingly empty space.
The uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics implies that space can never be truly empty. Instead, random fluctuations give birth to a seething cauldron of particles, such as electrons, and their antimatter counterparts, called positrons.
These so-called "virtual particles" normally annihilate one another too quickly for us to notice them. But physicists predicted in the 1930s that a very strong electric field would transform virtual particles into real ones that we can observe. The field pushes them in opposite directions because they have opposite electric charges, separating them so that they cannot destroy one another.
Lasers are ideally suited to this task because their light boasts strong electric fields. In 1997, physicists at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) in Menlo Park, California, used laser light to create a few electron-positron pairs. Now, new calculations suggest next-generation lasers will be able to create such pairs by the millions.

Chain reaction
In the SLAC experiment, only one electron-positron pair was created at a time. But with more powerful lasers, a chain reaction becomes probable.
The first pair is accelerated to high speed by the laser, causing them to emit light. This light, combined with that of the laser, spawns still more pairs, say Alexander Fedotov of the National Research Nuclear University in Moscow and colleagues in a study to appear in Physical Review Letters.
"A large number of particles will spill out of the vacuum," says John Kirk of the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics in Heidelberg, Germany, who was not involved in the study.
In lasers that can concentrate about 1026 watts into a square centimetre, this runaway reaction should efficiently convert the laser's light into millions of electron-positron pairs, the team calculates.

Antimatter factory
That kind of intensity could be reached with a laser to be built by the Extreme Light Infrastructure project in Europe. The first version of the laser could be built by 2015, but it could take a few years after that to complete upgrades necessary to reach 1026 per square centimetre, says study co-author Georg Korn of the Max Planck Institute for Quantum Optics in Garching, Germany.
The ability to generate large numbers of positrons could be useful for particle colliders like the proposed International Linear Collider, which will smash electrons and positrons together, says Kirk McDonald of Princeton University in New Jersey.
But Pisin Chen of National Taiwan University in Taipei says the cost of the very powerful laser might make this method more expensive than the alternative. The standard way to create large numbers of positrons today is to fire a beam of high-energy electrons at a piece of metal to produce electron-positron pairs.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Well, i did some surfing and it iturns out that according to the theory it is really possible... But maybe not in clouds. The point is that the electrical field must be extremely strong. But then again weird things can happen inside a thunder cloud.

It is about the Schwinger limit.

The quantum vacuum is unstable under the influence of an external electric field, as the virtual electron-positron dipole pairs can gain energy from the external field. If the field is sufficiently strong, these virtual particles can gain the threshold pair creation energy 2mc^2 and become real electron-positron pairs. This remarkable phenomenon was first predicted by Heisenberg and his student Hans Euler in 1936, based on work of Sauter in 1931, and later formalized in the language of QED by Schwinger in 1951. However, the electric field required to see this effect is astronomically huge, E_critical~ 10^(16) V/cm, and so it has not yet been directly observed, even using the strongest lasers.

http://www.phys.uconn.edu/~dunne/dunne_schwinger.html



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwinger_limit

What i understand of it is that the creation of the pair weakens the surrounding electrical field.

 

[William Gaatjes]

Maybe something is going on during inner cloud discharges. Something similar as in this article. a plasma wakefield accelerating electrons or protons to extreme energies. Maybe these electrons hit other particles and create positrons. The strong electric fields keeps them in existence for a short time.

http://arstechnica.com/science/2014...chnology-gets-high-speeds-in-short-distances/

Scientific Method / Science & Exploration
New particle accelerator technology gets high speeds in short distances
A plasma wakefield takes relativistic electrons and gives them a boost.

The plasma wakefield chamber at SLAC. Laptop and telephone optional.
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Scientists working on an experiment at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory in the US have taken a step forward in developing a technology which could significantly reduce the size of particle accelerators and, consequently, their cost. The technology is able to accelerate particles in a far shorter space than conventional accelerators.
One of the most impressive aspects of particle accelerators used for research, notably the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN, are their physical size. Yet even with a circumference of 27km, the LHC would be smaller than most of the next generation of proposed colliders. For example, the International Linear Collider (ILC), a possible future collider of electrons and positrons (anti-electrons) could be 31km long, and there is even a proposal for a circular accelerator with an 80km circumference that could be built at CERN as part of the Future Circular Colliders (FCC) project.
The size of all of these machines is determined by our ability to build structures that can transfer energy to particles, allowing us to accelerate them to greater speeds. The higher the speed, the greater the energy when these particle beams collide, giving scientists a better chance of answering fundamental questions about the Universe. This is because higher energy collisions can create conditions that are similar to those that existed closer to when the Universe was born.
Most current accelerators use a structure called an “rf cavity,” a carefully designed box through which the particle beam passes. The cavity transfers electromagnetic energy into the kinetic energy of particles, accelerating them. However, there is a limit to the amount of energy that an rf cavity can transfer to particles. This is because, even though it operates in a vacuum, there is a risk that increasing electromagnetic fields can lead to lightning-like discharges of energy.
However, even routine, lower-energy experiments in places like CERN require more energy than a single rf cavity can provide. The current solution is to use many rf cavities arranged in a straight line, if it is a linear machine such as the one at SLAC, or using the same cavity very many times if it is in a circular machine, such as the LHC. Either solution presents challenges and requires a large machine to fit the many parts needed. This raises the costs. Any technology the can increase the acceleration with smaller parts and without the need for more machinery will make future accelerators more compact.
This matters because particle accelerators are not just for particle physicists. They are increasingly used in medicine, industry, and security. For example, accelerators provide X-rays and particle beams for cancer therapy, for the fabrication of minuscule devices, and for scanning the contents of everything from suitcases to freight containers.
The new technology, which could promise more compact particle accelerators, has just been described in a study in Nature. The study suggests that if bunches of electrons are passed through a short column of lithium vapor plasma in rapid succession, the electric field of the plasma is able to translate enough energy to accelerate particles hundreds of times more quickly than the LHC. It is able to achieve all this while only being 30cm in length.
Plasma is a state of matter where atoms are broken down into positively charged ions and negatively charged electrons. Most of the matter in the Sun exists as plasma, and we can create that state on Earth using high energy lasers.
The electric field between particles in a plasma can be extremely high. In this experiment, a bunch of high-energy electrons is sent through the plasma, causing the electrons of the plasma to move, leaving behind it a region of oscillating electrons. This oscillation generates a “wakefield” that can then be used to accelerate a second set of trailing electrons following closely behind the first bunch. A meter of plasma was sufficient to raise the electrons' energy by 1.6 Giga-electronVolts.
Although previous experiments have shown even greater gains in energy, what makes this experiment interesting is the number of electrons accelerated and how evenly each of them acquires energy. Being able to accelerate large numbers of particles to the same energy simultaneously is a prerequisite for any practical use of plasma wakefield acceleration technology.
Other groups around the world, including the AWAKE collaboration at CERN and the ALPHA-X collaboration based at the University of Strathclyde, are pursuing different approaches to plasma wakefield acceleration using proton beams or lasers to generate the wakefield. There are already tentative designs being proposed for future accelerators that could make use of this technology, but they all rely on us developing technology that reliably accelerates large numbers of particles.

 

[William Gaatjes]

He guys and gals, i remembered and looked it up about there being two kinds of lightning. One created by a negative charge that can be up to millions of volts. and positive charge that can be up to billions of volts. The latter ones are extremely dangerous because of the enormous amount of charge being held and these form channels of ionized gas that can be miles long and traveling horizontally.

 

[inachu]

He guys and gals, i remembered and looked it up about there being two kinds of lightning. One created by a negative charge that can be up to millions of volts. and positive charge that can be up to billions of volts. The latter ones are extremely dangerous because of the enormous amount of charge being held and these form channels of ionized gas that can be miles long and traveling horizontally.

I also heard of ground lightning.

 

[Rubycon]

It would be neat to be able to shoot a laser with sufficient power to create a conductive plasma trail at an active cumulonimbus cloud. If successful, an immediate return stroke should follow. While categorized as triggered lightning, it would be powerful but far below most naturally occurring strokes.

The idea of having "lightning on command" sounds enticing indeed!

 

[inachu]

It would be neat to be able to shoot a laser with sufficient power to create a conductive plasma trail at an active cumulonimbus cloud. If successful, an immediate return stroke should follow. While categorized as triggered lightning, it would be powerful but far below most naturally occurring strokes.

The idea of having "lightning on command" sounds enticing indeed!

It would be very very loud.

The basic idea here is that you will be creating a tesla coil but without the coils.

Now imagine changing the frequencies of the laser and now you can create music out of the clouds like this: https://youtu.be/L5E4NiP4hpM?t=158

Per the video just imagine using lighting as means of propulsion like in the above link.

 

[inachu]

It would be neat to be able to shoot a laser with sufficient power to create a conductive plasma trail at an active cumulonimbus cloud. If successful, an immediate return stroke should follow. While categorized as triggered lightning, it would be powerful but far below most naturally occurring strokes.

The idea of having "lightning on command" sounds enticing indeed!

https://youtu.be/bTkjgBRiCsE?t=609

 

[Rubycon]

Everyone does singing tesla coils. The arcs are pretty craptacular at reproducing music. And standing "in the line of fire" like that is pretty risky despite the precautions. One stray D'Arsonval discharge connecting you to the primary side is going to make your day very bad.

This is much better!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-64fVpMU9A

I saw a demo in the 90s with a much larger PSU. The flame/arc was about a meter tall and wide (!) and it kept cutting out because the 30A 208VAC three phase circuit kept tripping offline. :awe: