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=p′μ1+p′μ2
Taking the inner product of this with itself:
⟨pμ1|pμ1⟩+2⟨pμ1|pμ2⟩+⟨pμ2|pμ2⟩=⟨p′μ1|p′μ1⟩+2⟨p′μ1|p′μ2⟩+⟨p′μ2|p′μ2⟩
Using the fact that ⟨pμi|pμi⟩=m20c2, we can simplify this:
2m0c2+2m0E=2m0c2+2(E′1E′2c2−→p′1⋅→p′2)⟹m0E=E′1E′2c2−→p′1⋅→p′2
We note that →p′1⋅→p′2=‖, 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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