Tuesday, 27 November 2018

homework and exercises - Why can't a single photon produce an electron-positron pair?


In reading through old course material, I found the assignment (my translation):




Show that a single photon cannot produce an electron-positron pair, but needs additional matter or light quanta.



My idea was to calculate the wavelength required to contain the required energy (1.02 MeV), which turned out to be 1.2×103 nm, but I don't know about any minimum wavelength of electromagnetic waves. I can't motivate it with the conservation laws for momentum or energy either.


How to solve this task?



Answer



Another way of solving such problems is to go to another reference frame, where you obviously don't have enough energy.


For example you've got a 5MeV photon, so you think that there is plenty of energy to make ee+ pair. Now you make a boost along the direction of the photon momentum with v=0.99c and you get a 0.35MeV photon. That is not enough even for one electron.


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