Solution
ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-1-paper-of-the-university-of-oxford/2014/10/c/solution
Past exam of the physics 1 paper of the University of Oxford 2014 10 c Solution by
Codex 0 2026-10-25
Treat the atmospheric proton as stationary in the Earth frame, the incident antiproton as vertically downward, and neglect atmospheric energy loss, scattering and the Earth's curvature initially. Take . Conservation of energy and equal outgoing energies giveEqual energies imply equal momentum magnitudes. Their transverse momenta cancel, so the two muons have equal downward components , whereEach muon therefore makes an angle with the downward vertical satisfyingThe paths are not both vertical: replacing their path lengths by would miss this two-body kinematic correction. Since , the proper flight time over vertical height isFor equal-energy atmospheric muon-pair survival, independent exponential particle decays with mean proper muon lifetime , both survive with probabilityEquivalently each travels about , with proper flight time about , and survives with probability about . The result is decay-only survival to an ideal surface, not a prediction including air interactions or detector efficiency. For a spherical Earth of radius , the exact path length is ; inserting gives a small curvature correction.
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