Conjecture for Resolving the Cosmic Heat-Death Deadlock

Existing vacuum experiments on low-energy photon collisions have not yielded clear evidence for spontaneous energy collection purely between photons. Interactions between photons and material particles such as electrons and atoms manifest as photon absorption by matter followed by subsequent photon re-emission. This paper makes no prior judgment on the relative energy of re-emitted photons. If all material particles in the universe were annihilated, such material-dependent absorption-re-emission channels would cease to operate. Treating the universe as a system with infinite space and infinite evolutionary time, the universe would evolve into a state filled with uniformly dispersed low-energy photons and reach heat death in the absence of direct photon-to-photon energy-collection mechanisms. However, the real universe has not reached such an end state. This paper therefore proposes a conjecture: there exists a direct energy-collection process among low-energy photons without mediation by material particles. This process requires extremely stringent conditions and occurs with extremely low probability; it has not yet been detected due to limited experimental sensitivity. If this mechanism exists, it can intermittently generate high-energy gamma-ray photons, which trigger strong-force self-locking to produce material particles and sustain the cyclic conversion between photons and matter in the universe. High-sensitivity experimental schemes are suggested for future verification of this conjecture.