Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-physics-a-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2022/paper-1/section-a/2/solution

The protons at the Large Hadron Collider are ultrarelativistic: their energy is much greater than their rest energy, about . The relativistic energy-momentum relation therefore gives . Using the de Broglie wavelength,
Thus the conventional de Broglie wavelength estimate is a distance of order .
There is a conventional factor of in interpreting this estimate. Spatial resolution from momentum transfer is often expressed as , where is the transferred momentum multiplied by the speed of light. Taking of order the beam energy gives
Both conventions describe the same characteristic scale up to . The beam energy alone does not give an exact experimental spatial resolution: a particular collision probes a scale set by its actual momentum transfer.

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