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Is There a Limit To a Laser's Energy?
StartsWithABang (3485481) writes "For normal matter — things like protons, neutrons and electrons — there's a fundamental limit to the number of particles you can fit into a given region of space thanks to the Pauli exclusion principle. But photons aren't subject to that limit; in theory, you could cram an infinite number of them into the same exact state. In principle, then, couldn't you create a laser (or lasing cavity) with an infinite amount of energy inside? Perhaps, but there are some big challenges to be overcome!"
"Update: After a conversation with Chad Orzel, it looks like although there's no limit to the photon energy you can produce, you will at some point--above about 1 MeV in photon energy--start spontaneously producing matter-antimatter pairs of particles whenever your photon interacts with a reflective surface. So at extremely high photon energies, your laser light begins to resemble a matter-antimatter thermal bath rather than merely coherent light."
So it would act like more Star Wars weapons?
Table-ized A.I.
Exactly.
This is the usual muddle up between energy and intensity.
There is no apparent upper limit to the energy of a photon. The galaxy Markarian 501 emits photons in the teraelectronvolt (TeV) range.
The question here is about intensity. The relativistic energy-moment dispersion, E^2=(mc^2)^2+(pc)^2, which applies to all on-shell particles, has a gap when m>0. This gap, which is about 1 MeV for electrons and positrons, can be overcome when the electric field (generated by a sufficient number of photons, irrespective of their energy) approaches the Schwinger limit of about 1.3 x 10^18 V/m. At this point, virtual electron-positron pairs can be created in abundance because the mass gap has been overcome, and electromagnetism then becomes non-linear. Pumping in more photons after this simply creates more virtual e-p pairs.
Hope that helps.
(IAAP working on this topic).