The law of conservation of energy sets a minimum photon energy required for the creation of a pair of fermions: this threshold energy must be greater than the total rest energy of the fermions created. To create an electron-positron pair, the total energy of the photons, in the rest frame, must be at least 2 m e c = 2 × 0.511 MeV = 1.022 MeV (m e is the mass of one electron and c is the speed of light in vacuum), an energy value that corresponds to soft gamma ray photons. The creation of a much more massive pair, like a proton and antiproton, requires photons with energy of more than 1.88 GeV (hard gamma ray photons).