Light My Fireball: Artist’s rendering of a black hole emitting a jet of hot gas known as plasma. An international team of scientists, including Rochester researchers, has generated plasma “fireballs” experimentally, opening a new frontier in laboratory astrophysics. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
An international team of scientists has developed a novel way to experimentally produce 
How It Works: 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. Credit: University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics illustration / Heather Palmer
Implications for High-Energy-Density Science
“The laboratory generation of plasma ‘fireballs’ composed of matter, antimatter, and photons is a research goal at the forefront of high-energy-density science,” says lead author Charles Arrowsmith, a physicist from the 
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. Credit: University of Rochester Laboratory for Laser Energetics illustration / Heather Palmer
Laboratory Generation of Astrophysical Plasmas
In other words, the beam they generated in the lab had enough particles to start behaving like a true astrophysical plasma.
“This 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.
The team has also developed techniques to modify the emittance of pair beams, making it possible to perform controlled studies of plasma interactions in scaled analogs of astrophysical systems.
Enhancing Understanding of Cosmic Phenomena
“Satellite and ground telescopes are not able to see the smallest details of those distant objects and so far we could only rely on numerical simulations. Our laboratory work will enable us to test those predictions obtained from very sophisticated calculations and validate how cosmic fireballs are affected by the tenuous interstellar plasma,” says coauthor Gianluca Gregori, a professor of physics at the University of Oxford.
Moreover, he adds, “The achievement highlights the importance of exchange and collaboration between experimental facilities around the world, especially as they break new ground in accessing increasingly extreme physical regimes.”
The team’s findings come amid ongoing efforts to advance plasma science by colliding ultrahigh-intensity lasers, an avenue of research that will be explored using the NSF OPAL Facility.
Reference: “Laboratory realization of relativistic pair-plasma beams” by C. D. Arrowsmith, P. Simon, P. J. Bilbao, A. F. A. Bott, S. Burger, H. Chen, F. D. Cruz, T. Davenne, I. Efthymiopoulos, D. H. Froula, A. Goillot, J. T. Gudmundsson, D. Haberberger, J. W. D. Halliday, T. Hodge, B. T. Huffman, S. Iaquinta, F. Miniati, B. Reville, S. Sarkar, A. A. Schekochihin, L. O. Silva, R. Simpson, V. Stergiou, R. M. G. M. Trines, T. Vieu, N. Charitonidis, R. Bingham and G. Gregori, 12 June 2024, Nature Communications.
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-49346-2
In addition to LLE, University of Oxford, and CERN, collaborating institutions on this research include the Science and Technology Facilities Council Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (STFC RAL), the University of Strathclyde, the Atomic Weapons Establishment in the UK, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Max Planck Institute for Nuclear Physics, the University of Iceland, and the Instituto Superior Técnico in Portugal.
This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Research and Innovation program under Grant Agreement No 101057511 (EURO-LABS).
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