Quantcast
  • Register
PhysicsOverflow is a next-generation academic platform for physicists and astronomers, including a community peer review system and a postgraduate-level discussion forum analogous to MathOverflow.

Welcome to PhysicsOverflow! PhysicsOverflow is an open platform for community peer review and graduate-level Physics discussion.

Please help promote PhysicsOverflow ads elsewhere if you like it.

News

PO is now at the Physics Department of Bielefeld University!

New printer friendly PO pages!

Migration to Bielefeld University was successful!

Please vote for this year's PhysicsOverflow ads!

Please do help out in categorising submissions. Submit a paper to PhysicsOverflow!

... see more

Tools for paper authors

Submit paper
Claim Paper Authorship

Tools for SE users

Search User
Reclaim SE Account
Request Account Merger
Nativise imported posts
Claim post (deleted users)
Import SE post

Users whose questions have been imported from Physics Stack Exchange, Theoretical Physics Stack Exchange, or any other Stack Exchange site are kindly requested to reclaim their account and not to register as a new user.

Public \(\beta\) tools

Report a bug with a feature
Request a new functionality
404 page design
Send feedback

Attributions

(propose a free ad)

Site Statistics

205 submissions , 163 unreviewed
5,082 questions , 2,232 unanswered
5,354 answers , 22,789 comments
1,470 users with positive rep
820 active unimported users
More ...

  Photon energies of neutral pion decay

+ 1 like - 1 dislike
1223 views

I am trying to find the photon energies of the decay $\pi_0 \rightarrow \gamma\gamma$ and their dependence on the pion energy $E_{\pi}$, its initial velocity $\beta$ and the scattering angle between the photon and initial pion trajectory $\theta$ in the lab frame. Assuming ($\star$) one photon is travels in the direction that the $\pi_0$ was travelling, I can get the photon energies with conservation of energy and momentum like this: $$E_{\pi}=E_1+E_2$$ $$p_{\pi} = \frac{1}{c}(E_1-E_2)\quad \text{with} \quad p_{\gamma_{1,2}}=\frac{E_{\gamma_{1,2}}}{c}$$ to $$E_{1,2}=\frac{1}{2}(E_{\pi}\pm cp_{\pi})$$ But ($\star$) can't be the general answer because in the laboratory frame, the photons might be emitted at an angle $\theta$ to the original $\pi_0$ direction. So I thought I'd say $$p_{\pi}=p_{1,2}\cos\theta$$ which would change my result to: $$E_{1,2}=\frac{E_{\pi}}{2\pm\cos\theta}.$$ Can anyone confirm this result? I am missing an explicit dependency on the initial $\pi_0$ velocity $\beta$ here. Because the next step would be to confirm the photon energies are limited by $$E_{\pi}(1\pm\beta)/2.$$

Closed as per community consensus as the post is undergraduate level
asked Jan 10, 2015 in Closed Questions by Chris [ revision history ]
closed Jun 22, 2015 as per community consensus

It might be easier if you solve it in rest frame and then transform back to lab frame. Anyway this is not graduate-level-upwards, vote to close. @Upvoters please do the voting in the linked post.

What is it then?




user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Your rights
...