The creation of new particles in high-energy collisions, often used to probe fundamental interactions.Particle production refers to the creation of new particles from energy, typically in high-energy collisions or through interactions with fields. This process is fundamental to particle physics, as it allows scientists to probe the building blocks of matter and the forces that govern them. When particles collide at high speeds, the kinetic energy can be converted into mass, producing new particles that may be unstable and decay quickly, leaving traces that detectors capture. This is how the Higgs boson was discovered and how the properties of quarks and gluons are studied.
The concept emerged with the development of particle accelerators in the mid-20th century, and the first antiparticles were produced in cosmic ray experiments in the 1930s. The standard model of particle physics, which describes particle production, was formulated in the 1970s.
In a collision, the energy available in the center-of-mass frame can exceed the rest mass of heavier particles, allowing them to be created via E=mc². The newly created particles fly outward, and their trajectories, energies, and decay products are measured by detectors. In some cases, particles can also be produced from vacuum fluctuations in strong electromagnetic or gravitational fields, a phenomenon that has been observed in heavy-ion collisions and is theorized to occur near black holes.
Particle production is used in medical positron emission tomography (PET) scans, where positrons are produced by radioactive decay, and in particle therapy for cancer treatment, where accelerated particles create secondary particles that damage tumors.
In high-energy collisions at the Large Hadron Collider, the energy density is so high that it briefly creates a state of matter called quark-gluon plasma, which existed microseconds after the Big Bang.
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