Yes there is.

Electron-positron pair creation during close flyby of two photons, one of which exceeded the 1.022 MeV minimum energy threshold without any atomic nuclei being close by was first experimentally confirmed by Kirk McDonald et al. at the Stanford Linear Accelerator in 1997 with experiment #144

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/exp/e144/

http://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.79.1626

Thanks for your helpful answer, André!

Glad to have been of help.

Strangely, many such paradigm changing experimental discoveries made over the course of the past 50 years seem not to ever be brought forward or referenced in textbooks issued after these discoveries are made.

They end up seldom or even never being brought up when the pertaining issues are discussed.

Each time an opportunity warrants, I refer to one of them.

Dear André!

Honest, I'm a bit surprised of your answer. I have never heard of this experimental evidence. Electron-positron pair production was to be expected but this should be only the half of the truth.

What happens if electromagnetic radiation with different energy interact? The experimental assessment of this question should be easy.

I agree with you: experimental discoveries which do not fit in the picture are frequently ignored.

Best Regards!

Hans

Dear Hans

Electron-positron pair production from photons of energy 1.022 MeV or more has been discovered in the 1930’s by Blackett and Oc­chialini. If you look those up, you will get the whole story.

They observed that any photon of energy 1.022 MeV or more, that has no rest mass and is elec­trically neutral, will destabilize and convert to a pair of electron-positron, massive and charged in opposition, when grazing a heavy particle such as an atomic nucleus.

They After destabilization, the separated halves of the photon's energy can thereafter be ob­served behaving as one massive 0.511 MeV/c2 electron plus one massive 0.511 MeV/c2 positron traveling separately whose velocity away from each other is linked to the residual energy that the mother photon possessed in excess of the 1.022 MeV energy threshold level now making up the rest masses of both particles, a process that they observed from analyzing recorded cosmic radiation scattering impact traces in a bubble cham­ber in the early 1930’s.

They also observed how electron-positron pairs could reconvert to photon states.

Until the 1997 McDonald et al. experiment in 1997, this was proven to occur only if the photon grazed a heavy particle, such as an atomic nucleon.

This is history in fact.

With photons of energy lower than 1.022 MeV, there is insufficient energy for decoupling, so none can occur, since this is the minimal amount required to make up the rest masses of both particles (1 electron plus 1 positron).

With photons of energy higher than 1.022 MeV, production occurs, with the residual energy in excess of 1.022 defining the velocity away from each other of both particles.

With energy way higher than 1.022 MeV, all sorts of metastable massive particles (called partons when they are the result of photons resulting from collisions between particles) have been proven to occur in all high energy accelerators. Even the late comer Higgs boson is such a parton.

If the energy density of the system of the two photons is large enough, matter can be created.

https://icols.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/pdf/Vuletic.pptx.pdf

Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) researchers have brought together a pair of photons in the strongest coupling possible during a recent experiment. The interaction was great enough to change the phase of each photon by 180 degrees.

http://www.nature.com/nphoton/journal/v8/n12/full/nphoton.2014.253.html

Thanks for the links Hossein

I was not aware of these lines of applied research

Dear André

I am glad it is interesting for you. Thank you for your honestly.

Dear André!

I did not express myself well.

The electron-positron pair production is well-known since many years. But the "flyby" should happen with an atomic nucleus. The experimental evidence of electron-positron pair creation during close flyby of two photons is new to me. But this interaction between photons was to be espected. Best thanks for your information!

Hans

I agree that it was to be expected.

What is a little discouraging is that even if the discovery occured in 1997, that is 18 years ago, barely anyone seems to be aware of it in the formal community. I may be wrong, but this is the perception I have.

You are right with your perception, André.

It is apparent that photon-photon interactions speak against the classical declaration of red shift and also against the big-bang-theory.

Two incoming photons scatter each other and in the final state there are two photons. This process is not allowed at the tree level as the photons do not carry any charge ( they are Majorana particles), so they cannot couple directly to each other. This process in however allowed in quantum electrodynamics due to the presence of a higher order diagram. See the attached diagram collected from wikipedia. Here at each vertex photon creates virtual electron-positron pairs. Four such vertices can be combined to form a loop diagram for the required process.

For unpolarized photons scattering cross section was calculated in 1951 by Karplus and Neuman. They found that for forward scattering cross section has the highest value of 4.1×10−31 cm2/sterad near 1.75 MeV of center of mass energy.

Interesting paper, and not doubting that electron-positron pairs can be created in this manner, but:

 Quote:

"This prevents pair formation from a single photon (or plane wave)—to

transform light into matter"

 This is blatantly false. They obviously do not know about Blackett and Occhialini's discovery of this very process at the beginning of the 1930's. How could they not know of this major discovery almost 90 years ago!

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/physics/laureates/1948/blackett-bio.html

Conversion of photons of energy 1.022 MeV or more to a pair of electron and positron does not prove that the law of conservation of energy is not valid.

The reason is very simple in this case because the energy making up the electron and the positron is the same energy that the photon was made of before conversion.

The mass of one electron contains 0.522 MeV of energy.

The mass of one positron also contains the same amount of 0.522 MeV of energy.

Adding both quantities, you have the minimal amount of 1.022 MeV that one photon must have to be able to convert.

Any energy in excess of 1.022 MeV that the mother photon could have is used to sustain the velocity in opposite direction of the two new particles.

So the total amount of energy before conversion is exactly equal to the total amount of energy after conversion.

Dear André!

We should consider the pair production and the annihilation of positron and electron as very important transformations. I'm astonished that this processes are side issues in physics.

My Regards!

Hans

Thesis The Reason of a realistic View to Particles and Atomic Nuclei

Dear Hans

I totally agree. It seems inconceivable to me that researchers on the cutting edge seem not to be aware of totally confirmed experimental information such as pair-production from a single photon. Should the quality of transmission of knowledge in academia be questioned?

Even in the astrophysics community, no mention can be found of this very elementary and basic process with regard to positron production in the Sun's corona.

Even in such an excellent textbook as "Physics of the Solar Corona" Springer 2006, Markus Aschwanden puts in perspective positron production in the corona by beta- decay from radioactive ions as shown by Pauli in 1930. But quite astonishingly, no mention whatsoever is made of the positron materialization process from photons of energy 1.022+ MeV decoupling into electron-positron pairs even if it is made quite obvious that high energy electromagnetic photons are all pervading in the corona.

I read your paper, and see with interest that you also have come to the conclusion that complex particles can only be made from electron and positron as building material.

On my side, I studied only the stable particles that are the only components of the "normal" matter that can be found in the universe (all atoms in the periodic table), which are the electron, the positron, the proton and the neutron, which I name "the stable set".

I left out all unstable states, because they all ultimately decay into one or other of the stable particles, besides electromagnetic photons and neutrinos, and can in no way be part of normal matter

André, a short reply: The pair-production and the β+-decay have both the same minimum energy of 1,022MeV. This should be a satisfactory proof that a hidden pair production is the cause of the β+-decay.

Lets make clear the difference between photon-photon –interaction– and –scattering– , which are completely different things. We must keep in mind that there is no photon-photon vertex in QED, but photon-photon scattering is possible through higher-order process involving virtual particles (in this case, electron-positron virtual pairs would be part of the most relevant vertex [photon-elec.-posit.], since electrons(positrons) are the charged particles with the lowest mass... therefore "the easier" to produce -virtually-. Easiest = lowest energy budget needed). Actually, in talks with Prof. D. Baldomir, we agreed the term "interaction" is misapplied in many situations/discussions... because interaction refers to a fundamental vertex processes (with a single node). Many times, when the word "interaction" is used –specially when talking about gamma-ray absorption in Very High Energy (VHE) Astrophysics– the correct term to use should be scattering. In VHE, I think the correct term to use is pair-creation through photon-photon inelastic scattering   (where electron-positron pairs are created from photon-photon collision).

For reference on "pair-creation through photon-photon inelastic scattering (collision)" it worth reading the paper from SLAC, where this was first measured:  

DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.79.1626

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Article Positron Production in Multiphoton Light-by-Light Scattering