One of the biggest mysteries of our time is fast radio bursts. They discharge as much energy as 500 million Suns in a brief explosion of radiation.
Scientists have been puzzled over what could be causing these brief outbursts in the billions of light-years away. In April 2020, we got a powerful flash of radio waves from something inside the Milky Way.
This suggests that there are some fast radio bursts that are produced by dead stars. Physicists have come up with a way to recreate the first stages of these insane explosions in a lab.
The laboratory simulation is a small-scale copy of a magnetar environment.
A magnetar is a type of dead star. When a massive star ends its lifespan, it blows off its outer material and the core, which is no longer supported by the outward pressure of nuclear fusion, collapses under its own gravity to form an ultra-dense object with a powerful magnetic field. The star is called the neutron star.
The magnetic field of some neutron stars is even more powerful. That is a magnetar. We don't know how they get this way, but their magnetic fields are 1,000 times more powerful than a normal neutron star and a quadrillion times more powerful than Earth's.
The scientists think that fast radio bursts are caused by the tension between the magnetic field and the inward pressure of gravity.
The antimatter pairs are thought to play a role in the emission of matter around the magnetar.
This is a different type of plasma than most of the others in the Universe. Heavy ion and electrons are in normal plasma. The matter-antimatter pairs form and destroy each other. The collective behavior of pair plasmas is very different from normal ones.
Qu and his colleagues came up with a way to create pair plasmas in a lab via other means because of the strength of the magnetic fields involved.
Rather than using a strong magnetic field, we use a strong laser.
The QED cascades convert energy into pair plasma. The laser pulse is shifted to a higher Frequency. The exciting result shows the possibilities for creating and observing QED pair plasma in laboratories and enabling experiments to verify theories about fast radio bursts.
The technique involves generating a high-speed electron beam. A moderately powerful laser is fired at the beam, and the resulting collision creates a pair of arcs.
The resulting plasma is slowed by it. One of the problems with previous experiments was that they couldn't observe their collective behavior.
We think we know what laws govern their behavior. Nat Fisch, a physicist at Princeton University, says that until we produce a pair of plasmas in the laboratory that show collective phenomena that we can probe, we can't be sure.
The problem is that it is hard to observe collective behavior. We realized that a great method of observation relaxes the conditions on what must be produced and leads us to a more practicable user facility.
The way to conduct these probes that have never been done before is offered by the observation experiment. It reduces the need for equipment that is beyond our technical capabilities.
The team is going to conduct a series of experiments at the National Accelerator Laboratory. They hope that this will help them understand how magnetars generate pair plasmas, how those pair plasmas might produce fast radio bursts, and to identify whatever previously unknown physics might be involved.
Physicist Sebastian Meuren says that what we are doing here is the starting point of the cascade that produces radio bursts.
If we could see a radio burst in the lab that would be very exciting. The first part is to observe the scattering of the electron beams, and once we do that, we will improve the laser intensity to get to higher densities to actually see the electron-positron pairs. The experiment will evolve over the next two years.
It might be a little bit longer until we get our answers on the radio. If we have learned anything over the years, it is that unraveling this fascinating mystery is definitely worth the wait.
The paper has been published.
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