Glimpsing the quantum vacuum: Particle spin correlations offer insight into how visible matter emerges from 'nothing'
From the article:
Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered experimental evidence that particles of matter emerging from energetic subatomic smashups retain a key feature of virtual particles that exist only fleetingly in the quantum vacuum. The finding offers a new way to explore how the vacuum—once thought of as empty space—provides important ingredients needed to transform virtual "nothingness" into the matter that makes up our world.
This experiment has been interpreted to suggest virtual particles are “real” particles. This causes a problem though because virtual particles don’t have to satisfy energy conservation. The explanation has always been that virtual particles wink in and out of existence at such short times scales, ca. 10^-21 and shorter, that they can not be measured.
But I’ve always been ill-at-ease with this explanation. The reason is under special relativity, the time they exist can be made longer if the system is moving fast enough. Consider then, the highest Lorentz time dilation factor we can reach with our proton accelerators is ca. 10,000. But the highest energies observed with ultra high energy cosmic rays, UHECR’s, is a million times higher than our accelerators, corresponding to an equivalently higher time dilation to reach a dilation factor of 10^10. This means we would observe the existence times of the “virtual particles” arising from UHECR’s at 10^-11 s, or 10 picoseconds. This is well within the measuring times we’re capable of. In fact, the explanation of anomalous effects we observe with UHECR’s may be due to those “virtual particles” being measured as real:
https://www.google.com/search?q=anomalies+of+uhecr.
And using the fastest timing equipment we now have, we might not even have resort to looking at UHECR’s. Agostini, Krausz, and L’Huillier won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2023 for creating methods of measuring events at attosecond times scales, 10^-18. Then at our highest particle accelerator energies generating time dilations factors of ca. 10,000, virtual particles existing at 10^-21 seconds, would be observed by us to to last 10^-17 seconds, 10 attoseconds.
Another intriguing approach is from measurements of quantum tunneling. Some experimental results suggest this might happen at attosecond times scales rather than happening instantaneously as previously thought. Then measurements of quantum tunneling in accelerated systems to 10,000 time dilation factor would bring that time down to the 10^14 second, 10 femtosecond range. This is within the range of time measuring devices already present at our highest energy accelerators.