Wednesday 31 October 2018

pair production - Virtual and Real particles


In a discussion with my astrophysics lecturer, we ended up talking about virtual particles. One of the most astonishing phenomena he pointed out was the fact that annihilation of virtual particles produces no light, even tho real particles clearly do. We then started thinking of the Casimir effect, where you close down two plates, Casimir plates, so close to each other that a force arises (the space is tiny, barely enough for 1 electron). The main reason is due to virtual particles appearing on the different sides of the plates.


Now let's take a positron that is on the other side of the plate and has no way of interacting with it's pair electron inside, what would happen if it were to annihilate this virtual positron with a real electron? Would you get light and if so how much of it would you get?




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