As the title says. Virtual particles are to my understanding “particles that come into existence at random with their anti-version, they collide and eliminate one another”.
Are these particles made of something?
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Part of what’s so confusing here is that it’s hard to explain what a “particle” even is anymore. We describe things like electrons and quarks as disturbances in a “field”, kind of like waves on the ocean. We often describe these waves in terms of a sum of “fundamental” waves, and a particle is one of these smallest possible waves in the field.
In some sense, a particle is “made of” the field, in the same way that a wave is made of the ocean. Virtual particles are also made of the field in the same way, and anti-particles are just a different kind of wave on the same field.
What makes virtual particles different is that they don’t have to obey the same rules of conservation of energy as regular particles do. They can pop into and out of existence along with anti-particle partners, just so long as the violation of conservation of energy is short enough in time.
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