Physics Asked by sciencepiofficial on October 28, 2021
I know this sounds absurd, but after doing a little research I found that it may be possible (not entirely, but that is why I am asking about this here). I have been reading up on antimatter and quantum mechanics and I stumbled across this article on the subject of "creating antimatter with lightning". All lightning is is a stream of electrons travelling through a channel of ionised air. This is true of any electrical "arc". This brings me to my question. There is a trick which you can do with plasma globes (you can probably pick one up at a toy store quite easily), where you place a piece of aluminium foil on the top of the globe which attracts a stream of electrons via parasitic capacitance the the environment. However, I have put together a specialised spark-gap chamber which consists of two metal rods with sharp points ~0.2mm apart so that an arc jumps the gap. I attached a wire from the aluminium foil on the plasma globe to one of the electrodes, and I connected the other to ground. When I switched on the plasma globe, as expected, a small arc jumped the gap.
This experiment, while much less powerful (about 900,000 times less powerful) than lightning, does simulate it to some degree (with a constant flow of electrons with AC current instead of a small pulse of electrons with pulse current).
Lightning producing postitrons, i.e. the antiparticle of the electron can be seen here
In a collaborative study appearing in Nature, researchers from Japan describe how gamma rays from lightning react with the air to produce radioisotopes and even positrons—the antimatter equivalent of electrons.
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The gamma rays emitted in lightning have enough energy to knock a neutron out of atmospheric nitrogen,
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The final, prolonged emission was from the breakdown of now neutron-poor and unstable nitrogen atoms. These released positrons, which subsequently collided with electrons in annihilation events releasing gamma rays.
So it is not exactly pair creation. The energy of a lightning bolt is very large and gammas produced in order to create pairs of electron positrons would have to be at least 1MeV in energy.
The sparks in a spark gap in the lab do not have enough energy to generate gamma rays.
Answered by anna v on October 28, 2021
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