Paper 4, Section II, B
Part IA, 2010
A particle of rest mass is fired at an identical particle which is stationary in the laboratory. On impact, and annihilate and produce two massless photons whose energies are equal. Assuming conservation of four-momentum, show that the angle between the photon trajectories is given by
where is the relativistic energy of .
Let be the speed of the incident particle . For what value of will the photons move in perpendicular directions? If is very small compared with , show that
[All quantities referred to are measured in the laboratory frame.]