vanhees71 said:The intuitive explanation is that nothing ever is "popping out of the vacuum". The vacuum is nothing, and nothing can pop out of nothing. There's also no Dirac sea. It's just gotten rid of by normal ordering in the operator formalism or by renormalization of the total charge and and total energy, momentum, and angular momentum of the vacuum (all of these quantities are set to 0 in the vacuum state). Dirac's hole-theoretic formulation of QED is fortunately overcome by modern formulations of QFT.
Any other claim is just popular-science confusion for the public (which in fact deserves better explanations by scientists, because after all the tax payers are funding most of the fundamental research we do all over the world!). Also have a look at the newest Insights article:
https://www.physicsforums.com/insights/vacuum-fluctuation-myth/
joly said:there are virtual particle creations out the vacuum, which can be materialized if a field is present, is still a fact: That is the basis for the Casimir effect
joly said:But surely, that there are virtual particle creations out the vacuum, which can be materialized if a field is present, is still a fact
You are right, I was thinking of Schwinger pair creations. Apologies. I see also that the Casimir effect is not interpreted anymore in term of vacuum energy. Things have evolved since I learned about QFT...Vanadium 50 said:Not true.
Thanks. Those are interesting articles. It seems that most of what I have read on QFT (including several textbooks) and heard use a sloppy description. That's unsettling.weirdoguy said:
It's not true either. The Schwinger effect describes spontaneous pair creation due to a strong electromagnetic field. That's far from being vacuum!joly said:You are right, I was thinking of Schwinger pair creations. Apologies. I see also that the Casimir effect is not interpreted anymore in term of vacuum energy. Things have evolved since I learned about QFT...
That is of course what I mean: pair creations under large electric fields, which is why I brought it up in the context of the Casimir effect. The usual interpretation is as pair creation from vacuum . The pair got separated by a large enough electric field. The "borrowed" energy of the virtual pair creations is paid back by the electric field.vanhees71 said:It's not true either. The Schwinger effect describes spontaneous pair creation due to a strong electromagnetic field. That's far from being vacuum!
Vacuum pair creation on the light-cone is a quantum phenomenon in which a pair of particles (one matter and one antimatter) is created from the energy of a vacuum. This occurs when the energy of a system is high enough to overcome the barrier of the energy required to create the particles.
Vacuum pair creation on the light-cone occurs due to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, which states that there is a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, such as position and momentum, can be known simultaneously. In this case, the uncertainty in energy and time allows for the temporary creation of particle-antiparticle pairs.
The light-cone is a mathematical construct that represents the path of a particle traveling at the speed of light. In vacuum pair creation, the light-cone plays a crucial role in determining the energy and momentum of the created particles, as well as their direction of motion.
Yes, vacuum pair creation on the light-cone has been observed in various experiments, such as high-energy particle collisions and in the presence of strong electric fields. However, due to the short-lived nature of the created particles, their observation is often indirect.
The phenomenon of vacuum pair creation on the light-cone has important implications in various fields of physics, such as quantum electrodynamics and cosmology. It also plays a role in understanding the behavior of particles in extreme environments, such as near black holes. Additionally, the possibility of harnessing this phenomenon has been explored in the field of quantum computing.