Stephen Hawking popularized the theory that a vacuum fluctuation particle pair can have one particle of the pair captured while the other is released. He examined capture at the event horizon of a black hole, but antiparticles can also be captured by annihilation. The other particle of the pair is then freed. This annihilation-production interaction makes it appear that a particle has jumped from one place to another without accelerating, decelerating or traveling across that distance as we typically see in “orbital” transitions. It is a physical explanation for all quantum jumps and quantum tunneling. Particle decay can be facilitated by this Hawking type interaction, as it replaces neutrinos in particle equations. Annihilation-production interactions also facilitate nuclear fusion including low energy nuclear reactions. It also appears that energy is continuously being borrowed from and returned to the vacuum by way of these interactions leading us to a more complete understanding of conservation of energy. This paper consists of a detailed exploration of each of these vacuum fluctuation mediated annihilation-production events to give us a physical model for quantum phenomena.
