Government Scientists Are Creating Matter From Pure Light

In a U.S. government laboratory on Long Island, scientists have forged matter out of pure light using a sophisticated particle accelerator, while also demonstrating an elusive phenomenon for the first time ever on Earth.

The experimental breakthrough validated predictions made by influential physicists nearly a century ago and sheds new light on mysterious processes that occur on both quantum and cosmic scales.

This conversion of photons, which are massless light particles, into electrons, an elementary form of matter, was achieved by a team of researchers working with the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory. Though the theoretical groundwork of the new research has its origins in the early 20th century, it took special upgrades to an experiment called the Solenoidal Tracker at RHIC (STAR) detector to finally make it a reality.

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