[Physics] Physics Digest, Vol 1, Issue 10

[cj at mb-soft.com]

Footnote:  I also clearly do not understand how I should respond to anyone's comments, whether to a person individually, or to your structure, where the questioner might find it.  Sorry for beingn so ignorant.

As to "creating electrons and positrons", devious Physics Professors have many experiments to abuse students with.  Several are variations of this:  Total up the required energy of the two intended particles, which tells you the needed amount of energy you will need from the source radiation (in an accelerator).  Such precisely powered photons are then sent through a fairly conventional magnetic field.  Whenever any of the enormous number of photons you are sending through your viewing field happens to do a Constructive Interference, the result is really obvious.  The electron curves one way and the positron curves the opposite way, but exactly the same.  The curvature and the strength of the magnetic field allows you to do calculations to establish that they actually were an electron and a proton.  

A similar experimemnt which requires much more patience is to create a less powerful photon, to try to get it to create a pion+ and pion-.  That experiment does not seem to work as often, although I do not know why, but the path curvatures are different, which identifies the new particles as pions.  The equipment I was allowed to use was not powerful enough to create proton and anti-proton pairs, so I do not think I ever did that variation.


There are also experimental variants where a photon collides with any of several particles, but where the total energy available is correct.

Carl Johnson
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.tuks.nl/pipermail/physics/attachments/20161021/a5247b46/attachment.html>