Saturday, 20 June 2015

special relativity - How would one compute the angle of deflection, in a relativistic collision - underspecified system?


Consider the simplistic case of two identical mass particles colliding elastically with the second particle initially stationary and the first particle travelling with energy E. By conservation of 4-momentum we have:


pμ1+pμ2=pμ1+pμ2


Taking the inner product of this with itself:


pμ1|pμ1+2pμ1|pμ2+pμ2|pμ2=pμ1|pμ1+2pμ1|pμ2+pμ2|pμ2


Using the fact that pμi|pμi=m20c2, we can simplify this:


2m0c2+2m0E=2m0c2+2(E1E2c2p1p2)m0E=E1E2c2p1p2


We note that p1p2=, where \theta is the inner angle between \vec{p}_{1}' and \vec{p}_{2}'.


However, this results in a system with \|p_{1}'\|,\|p_{2}'\| and E_{1,2} unspecified and I cannot see how we could thus extract \theta from the initial conditions; what have I misunderstood or misapplied here?




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