{"id":23807,"date":"2017-02-15T15:39:00","date_gmt":"2017-02-15T14:39:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cms.zdv.uni-mainz.de\/fb08-prisma\/2017\/02\/15\/lichtteilchen-koennen-miteinander-kollidieren\/"},"modified":"2026-02-09T10:06:41","modified_gmt":"2026-02-09T09:06:41","slug":"lichtteilchen-koennen-miteinander-kollidieren","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/2017\/02\/15\/lichtteilchen-koennen-miteinander-kollidieren\/","title":{"rendered":"Light particles can collide with each other"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/jgu-base-pageheader><\/jgu-base-heading>\n\n
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Particle Physics researchers at the CERN research center near Geneva have experimentally observed an 80-year-old assumption about the scattering of light particles by light particles in particle collisions for the first time. This confirmed that the light particles, called photons, can interact with each other when they collide. According to classical theory, such an interaction of light beams is not permitted – they simply fly through each other. However, the German physicists Werner Heisenberg and Hans Euler had already made a prediction in 1935 in the context of quantum electrodynamics that in very rare cases the possibility of interaction exists. As part of the ATLAS experiment at CERN, scientists were able to determine the interaction of light particles and their scattering from the collision of lead ions for the first time. “We have obtained an incredibly beautiful measurement,” said Professor Matthias Schott of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU) about the results. Together with his work group and researchers from the German Electron Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg and the AGH University in Krakow, the particle physicist played a key role in measuring light-to-light scattering. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

With Maxwell’s equations, the Scottish physicist James Clerk Maxwell laid the foundation for the classical understanding of light in 1880, which actually prohibits the scattering of light by light. The consideration of quantum effects, which include both the electron and its antiparticle, the positron, then led to the modification of Maxwell’s equations by Euler and Heisenberg in 1935. “Now, a few weeks ago, we achieved the final breakthrough at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC), where we were able to see for the first time evidence of how light particles interact with each other,” explains Matthias Schott, with instructions that such events occur very rarely. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the experiments on light-to-light scattering, two particle beams were made to collide with lead ions at a center-of-mass energy of 5 teraelectronvolts (TeV) in the LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator. These highly relativistic lead ions have a very high electric field in the vicinity of the atomic nucleus, which can effectively be regarded as a beam of light particles. In very few collision events, lead ions come so close to each other that, although they themselves do not break up in the collision, two of their accompanying light particles are scattered together and can be detected in the ATLAS detector. A total of 13 events with the corresponding call number were identified in the ATLAS detector data from 2015. The results have now been presented at CERN. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a two-year renovation break, the Large Hadron Collider went back into operation in April 2015. Scientists at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz are particularly involved in the ATLAS experiment, one of the four major experiments at the LHC. The detector can detect and precisely measure particles produced in proton or lead collisions. Matthias Schott is a Lichtenberg Professor and head of an Emmy Noether junior research group at JGU. His research in the field of Experimental Particle and Astroparticle Physics (ETAP) is particularly concerned with fundamental questions about the building blocks of matter. <\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Particle Physics researchers at the CERN research center near Geneva have experimentally observed an 80-year-old assumption about the scattering of light particles by light particles in particle collisions for the first time. This confirmed that the light particles, called photons, can interact with each other when they collide. According to classical theory, such an interaction … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":554,"featured_media":19056,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[105],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-press-release"],"primary_category":{"id":105,"name":"Press release","slug":"press-release","parent":0,"breadcrumb":"Press release"},"media":{},"image":{"url":"https:\/\/cms.zdv.uni-mainz.de\/fb08-prisma\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/255\/2025\/10\/08_physik_etap_atlas_licht-an-licht-streuung.jpg","credit":""},"index":"15.02.2017","assigned_date":"","external_link":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/554"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23807"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23807\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28887,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23807\/revisions\/28887"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/prisma.uni-mainz.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}