- #1
Matt atkinson
- 116
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Moved from a technical forum, so homework template missing
Hello all, I'm just doing some practice for an upcoming exam and came upon this question in my notes:
One experimental way to generate very high energy photons is to ”collide” a laser beam against an electron beam, the photons that recoil in the direction parallel to the electron beam will have large energy. This is called ”Inverse Compton scattering”. Calculate the maximum recoil energy of the photons, assuming the initial energy of the photons is 1 eV and the electrons in the beam have energy E = 50 MeV.
Now I'm really stuck at how I should approach the question just drawing diagram wise...
i've had a few attempts where I set the electron and photon to move against each other on the x direction and then afterwards the photon recoils back 180 degrees from its intial momentum. But i just can't get a reasonable answer...
One experimental way to generate very high energy photons is to ”collide” a laser beam against an electron beam, the photons that recoil in the direction parallel to the electron beam will have large energy. This is called ”Inverse Compton scattering”. Calculate the maximum recoil energy of the photons, assuming the initial energy of the photons is 1 eV and the electrons in the beam have energy E = 50 MeV.
Now I'm really stuck at how I should approach the question just drawing diagram wise...
i've had a few attempts where I set the electron and photon to move against each other on the x direction and then afterwards the photon recoils back 180 degrees from its intial momentum. But i just can't get a reasonable answer...