Is it just based on once it reaches a threshold amount of energy, if so how does it know what type of particle pair it should convert into.
Bonus Question: When pair production does happen, are the particles ‘spawned in’ at different locations otherwise wouldn’t they just instantly annihilate each other. If it does ‘spawn in’ at different locations wouldn’t that require some sort of information transfer via a force or a particle?
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Photon don’t do “time”. They have a certain random probability at any instant of spawning a particle in an event. It’s not like a tiny timer inside.
We can only calculate probabilities, we can never predict what a single photon will do. What happens ‘under the hood’ is up to interpretation.
“For pair production to occur, the incoming energy of the photon must be above a threshold of at least the total rest mass energy of the two particles created.” (wikipedia) Also, pair production happens only close to an atom. The chance of it happening increases with its number of protons squared, and, as mentioned, with the energy of the photon. What is really happening there is difficult to access. But it is safe to say that it requires an interaction of the photon with matter in some way, if only with the electromagnetic field of that matter.
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> When pair production does happen, are the particles ‘spawned in’ at different locations otherwise wouldn’t they just instantly annihilate each other.
They do annihilate each other if they meet. So at the production it would be required that they move away from each other with sufficient kinetic energy.
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