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upstart writes:

Laser pincers generate antimatter by recreating neutron star conditions:

In principle, antimatter sounds simple – it’s just like regular matter, except its particles have the opposite charge. That basic difference has some major implications though: if matter and antimatter should ever meet, they will annihilate each other in a burst of energy. In fact, that should have destroyed the universe billions of years ago, but obviously that didn’t happen. So how did matter come to dominate? What tipped the scales in its favor? Or, where did all the antimatter go?

[...] But now, researchers have designed a new method that could produce antimatter in smaller labs. While the team hasn’t built the device yet, simulations show that the principle is feasible.

The new device involves firing two powerful lasers at a plastic block, one from either side in a pincer motion. This block would be crisscrossed by tiny channels, just micrometers wide. As each laser strikes the target, it accelerates a cloud of electrons in the material and sends them shooting off – until they collide with the cloud of electrons coming the other way from the other laser.

That collision produces a lot of gamma rays and, because of the extremely narrow channels, the photons are more likely to also collide with each other. This in turn produces showers of matter and antimatter, specifically electrons and their antimatter equivalent, positrons. Finally, magnetic fields around the system focus the positrons into an antimatter beam, and accelerate it to an extremely high energy.

Journal Reference:
He, Yutong, Blackburn, Thomas G., Toncian, Toma, et al. Dominance of γ-γ electron-positron pair creation in a plasma driven by high-intensity lasers [open], Communications Physics (DOI: 10.1038/s42005-021-00636-x)

Original Submission