I used to read the term "pure energy" in the context of matter-antimatter annihilation. Is the "pure energy" spoken of photons? Is it some form of heat? Some kind of particles with mass?
Basically, what does "pure energy" in the context of matter-antimatter annihilation refer to?
Best Answer
If I ruled the world, I would ban the phrase "pure energy" in contexts like this. There's no such thing as pure energy!
When particles and antiparticles annihilate, the resulting energy can take many different forms -- one of the basic principles of quantum physics is that any process that's not forbidden (say, because of violation of some sort of conservation law) has some probability of happening. So when a proton and an antiproton annihilate, they can produce photons, or pairs of other particles and antiparticles, such as a neutrino-antineutrino pair, or a positron-electron pair.
Although all sorts of things are possible, by far the most common product of matter-antimatter annihilation is photons, especially if the collision occurs at low energy. One reason is that lower-mass particles are easier to create than high-mass particles, and nothing has less mass than a photon. (Other particles, particularly neutrinos, have so little mass that they are "effectively massless," but neutrinos are weakly interacting particles, which means that the probability of producing them is lower.)