Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-short-options-paper-shared-by-prelims-and-parts-a-and-b-of-the-physics-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2012/s19/2/1/solution

Relativistic radiation is concentrated into an angle of order around the instantaneous velocity. The emission direction sweeps past a tangent observer over an orbital interval of order . Since the charge moves toward the observer, arrival times are compressed by an additional factor of order , giving the spectral scale .
The conventional numerical factor follows from the radiation Fourier phase. Near the tangent direction, circular motion gives
With , this becomes . The resulting Airy-type integrals are expressible through modified Bessel functions with tangent-plane argument . The standard angle-integrated synchrotron radiation spectrum has shape
It therefore identifies
The beaming argument supplies the physical scaling; the spectral integral fixes the conventional factor . Critical energy is a broad spectral scale, not a hard photon-energy cutoff.[ref]

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