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I am thinking of this now because I have been learning about the Schwinger limit (or Schwinger effect)...

Supposedly, a strong-enough electric and/or magnetic field creates a 'nonlinear' effect in the vacuum of space; and matter/antimatter is created from energy (pair production), even in th absence of early matter and it's electromagnetic fields...

Textbooks, sites and journals give estimates of the Schwinger regime in terms of Teslas or V/m, etc....

However, recent updates and news articles about Schwinger mention gamma ray(s) that can create matter in a vacuum.... either alone or when they cross other powerful photons... but they either don't mention how powerful the gamma ray photons are, or mention energies in eV....

P.S.: What, exactly, is 'nonlinear' about the Schwinger effect? An electric or magnetic field becomes stronger and stronger...then, at a certain point, there is enough energy concentrated at one point to create particles...

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  • $\begingroup$ What do you mean by '...'? Just '.'? Do you have any references? Have you read en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwinger_limit ? $\endgroup$
    – my2cts
    Commented 2 days ago
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    $\begingroup$ How can it possibly matter what kind of units one uses? You can measure distance to galaxies in millimeters if you want: it doesn't change the distance. $\endgroup$
    – ZeroTheHero
    Commented 2 days ago
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    $\begingroup$ Let us calculate. Imagine a steady source of 1 MeV gamma rays. Your $1\ cm^2$ detector is seeing 1000 gamma rays per second. That's a flux of $10^9\ eV/s/cm^2$, or, in SI units, $1.6\ µW/m^2$. Multiply by the vacuum impedance (~377 Ω), take the square root, and get 25 mV/m. $\endgroup$
    – John Doty
    Commented 2 days ago
  • $\begingroup$ "Textbooks, sites and journals give estimates", "However, recent updates and news articles" Please provide the specific references and quotes therein. If not, at least consider providing links. Otherwise this just reeks of lack of basic effort. $\endgroup$
    – Vincent Thacker
    Commented 8 hours ago

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