What Is The Minimum Photon Energy Needed To Produce Electron-Antielectron Pair?

Question

Find the minimum photon energy necessary to produce a electron-antielectron pair? What would be the frequency and wavelength of the photon?

I don't even know where to start on this one. Please Help!

Answer 1

What are you trying to do, create antimatter in your garage? Start with Stephen Hawking's "A Brief History of Time". Then, contact the folks at the new supercollider (CERN) in Switzerland. I'm sure someone there could help you. Finally, you may derive some useful information from this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antimatter

Answer 2

The rest mass of an electron is 511 KeV.  The rest mass of a positron (antielectron) is therefore the same.   So, you need at least the energy of the rest masses of the particles, or 1022 KeV, 1.022 MeV.   Then, the more energy you have in the photon, the higher the probability that pair production, and not Compton scattering, will occur.

Now that you know the energy, E=h*nu, etc to get the rest, right?

Answer 3

When a photon has quantum energy higher than the rest mass energy of an electron plus a positron, one of the ways that such a photon interacts with matter is by producing and electron-positron pair. The rest mass energy of the electron is 0.511 MeV, so for photon energy above 1.022MeV, pair production is possible.