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+--- Thread: Making antimatter out of light + Defensive "force fields" may be on horizon (/thread-10698.html)
Making antimatter out of light + Defensive "force fields" may be on horizon - C C - Jul 27, 2021
Physicists Have Figured Out How We Could Make Antimatter Out of Light
https://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-figured-out-how-we-could-make-antimatter-out-of-light
INTRO: A new study by scientists has demonstrated how researchers may be able to create an accelerating jet of antimatter from light.
A team of physicists has shown that high-intensity lasers can be used to generate colliding gamma photons – the most energetic wavelengths of light – to produce electron-positron pairs. This, they say, could help us understand the environments around some of the Universe's most extreme objects: neutron stars.
The process of creating a matter-antimatter pair of particles – an electron and a positron – from photons is called the Breit-Wheeler process, and it's extremely difficult to achieve experimentally. The probability of it taking place when two photons collide is very small. You need very high-energy photons, or gamma rays, and a lot of them, in order to maximize the chances of observation.
We don't yet have the capability to build a gamma-ray laser, so the photon-photon Breit-Wheeler process currently remains experimentally unachieved. But a team of physicists led by Yutong He of the University of California, San Diego (UC San Diego) has proposed a new workaround that, according to their simulations, could actually work... (MORE)
Air Force directed energy report argues defensive "force fields" may be on horizon
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/41624/air-force-directed-energy-report-argues-defensive-force-fields-may-be-just-on-the-horizon
EXCERPT: . . . The idea of a force field is still a science-fiction-inspired flight of fantasy, but heavier-than-air flight was also considered by some mainstream scientists to be a crazy idea only a little more than a century ago. There is also the reality that much of what is being developed on the cutting-edge in the directed energy space remains classified.
Still, from all indications, we're still a ways away from being able to fully realize these types of directed energy capabilities, but the Air Force Research Laboratory and other labs are clearly trying to envision future applications of more advanced versions of current DE concepts. It may be a stretch to call an automated high-powered microwave counter-drone system a "force field," but at least some parallels can be drawn between the concepts. In fact, if such a system were built to be omnidirectional in nature, it would perform a bit like a force field as we see it in science fiction. Regardless, for a good primer of what is possible now and what is possible in the future when it comes to directed energy, check out this in-depth interview of ours.
Ultimately, this new report by the AFRL shows just show promising directed energy capabilities are finally becoming to the battlefield of today, forcefields or not. If we have indeed already crossed the "tipping point" claimed in the article, the wars of the future are certainly going to resemble what has previously been seen only in science fiction... (MORE - missing details)