Electrons and positrons can spontaneously emerge from extremely strong electric fields in a vacuum through a tunneling process, i.e. matter can be "created". Researchers from the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) together with the University of Graz have now been able to explain this phenomenon in more detail than before using complex calculations.
According to Albert Einstein's famous formula E = mc2, mass can be converted into energy and, conversely, energy into mass. This requires electrical voltages of around 1000 quadrillion volts per meter - values that exceed even the high voltage of lightning by many orders of magnitude.
The team also succeeded in narrowing down the time window in which matter is created from strong electric fields. According to the physicists' numerical simulations, electrons and positrons do not take longer than one to two zeptoseconds - that is one to two trillionths of a billionth of a second - to emerge from the void of the vacuum into reality. So far, however, even the most powerful lasers are not strong enough to build up the necessary electric fields.
