You need to have enough energy (aka. mass, physicist will use the two interchangably) to pay for whatever particle you want. An electron weighs about 10^-30 kg

You need to have enough energy (aka. mass, physicist will use the two interchangably) to pay for whatever particle you want. An electron weighs about 10^-30 kg, or about half a megaelectronvolt, but because of cosmic balance you'll want to make a positron at the same time. So your total bill will be about 1 MeV. Visible light photons have about 1 eV of energy, if you want a photon with an MeV then you're past even hard x-rays and into gamma rays. This process is the same as matter-antimatter annihilation, except backwards. A proper explanation would take several years. By the way, you can use more than one photon at a time, but to my knowledge nobody has managed to fuse the million flashlight photons you'd need to do pair-production.