International Team Develops a Novel Way to Produce Plasma “Fireballs” on Earth

An illustration of a proton impinges Carbon and Tantalum atoms creating a shower of particles with turns into a fireball with a starry background.

A proton (far left) from the Super Proton Synchrotron (SPS) accelerator at CERN impinges on carbon nuclei (small gray spheres). This produces a shower of various elementary particles, including a large number of neutral pions (orange spheres). As the unstable neutral pions decay, they emit two high-energy gamma rays (yellow squiggly arrows). These gamma rays then interact with the electric field of Tantalum nuclei (large gray spheres), generating electron and positron pairs and resulting in the novel electron-positron fireball plasma. Because of these cascade effects, a single proton can generate many electrons and positrons, making this process of pair plasma production extremely efficient. (University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics illustration / Heather Palmer)

For the first time ever, an international team of scientists, including LLE Division Director for Plasma and Ultrafast Laser Science and Engineering Dustin Froula, staff scientist Daniel Haberberger, and other researchers at LLE, has developed a way to generate high-density relativistic electron–positron pair-plasma beams in a laboratory setting. The generation of plasma “fireballs,” which are ubiquitously found in extreme astrophysical environments like black holes and neutron stars, “is a research goal at the forefront of high-energy-density science,” says lead author Charles Arrowsmith, a physicist from the University of Oxford who is joining LLE in the fall. “This [achievement] opens up an entirely new frontier in laboratory astrophysics by making it possible to experimentally probe the microphysics of gamma-ray bursts or blazar jets,” Arrowsmith says.

To read the press release in full, please visit the University of Rochester NewsCenter.