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Pair Production in Photon Interactions

Pair production is the process of creating a particle and its antiparticle from a neutral boson, typically a photon creating an electron-positron pair. This process requires the incoming photon's energy to exceed the total rest mass energy of the created particles, and conservation laws dictate that all quantum numbers must sum to zero. The likelihood of pair production increases with photon energy and the atomic number of nearby atoms.

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9 views1 page

Pair Production in Photon Interactions

Pair production is the process of creating a particle and its antiparticle from a neutral boson, typically a photon creating an electron-positron pair. This process requires the incoming photon's energy to exceed the total rest mass energy of the created particles, and conservation laws dictate that all quantum numbers must sum to zero. The likelihood of pair production increases with photon energy and the atomic number of nearby atoms.

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Pair production is the creation of a subatomic particle and its antiparticle from a neutral boson.

Examples include creating an electron and a positron, a muon and an antimuon, or a proton and
an antiproton. Pair production often refers specifically to a photon creating an electron–positron pair
near a nucleus. As energy must be conserved, for pair production to occur, the incoming energy of the
photon must be above a threshold of at least the total rest mass energy of the two particles created.
(As the electron is the lightest, hence, lowest mass/energy, elementary particle, it requires the least
energetic photons of all possible pair-production processes.) Conservation of energy
and momentum are the principal constraints on the process.[1] All other conserved quantum numbers
(angular momentum, electric charge, lepton number) of the produced particles must sum to zero –
thus the created particles shall have opposite values of each other. For instance, if one particle has
electric charge of +1 the other must have electric charge of −1, or if one particle has strangeness of +1
then another one must have strangeness of −1.

The probability of pair production in photon–matter interactions increases with photon energy and
also increases approximately as the square of atomic number of (hence, number of protons in) the
nearby atom.[2]

Photon to electron and positron

[edit]

Diagram showing the process of electron–positron pair


production. In reality the produced pair are nearly collinear. The black dot labelled 'Z' represents an
adjacent atom, with atomic number Z.

For photons with high photon energy (MeV scale and higher), pair production is the dominant mode of
photon interaction with matter. These interactions were first observed in Patrick Blackett's counter-
controlled cloud chamber, leading to the 1948 Nobel Prize in Physics.[3] If the photon is near an atomic
nucleus, the energy of a photon can be converted into an electron–positron pair:

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