Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-symmetry-and-relativity-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2015/1/a/solution

Choose the source motion along , write , and let primes denote its instantaneous rest frame. A photon with rest-frame energy and direction has and transverse momentum . A Lorentz boost to the laboratory gives
Since , the relativistic aberration relation and its inverse are
The mapping is monotone. The boundary of the rest-frame forward hemisphere, , therefore maps to . An isotropic photon count assigns exactly half the photons to that hemisphere, proving
The photon count inside a relativistic beaming cone concerns an emitted ensemble and counts photons, not their total energy or the arrival-time-weighted power at a detector. The laboratory photon energies depend on direction, so “half the photons” need not mean half the radiated energy. At large the angular scale is .
Figure 1.
Aberration of an isotropic photon count and compression of arrival times
. Original evaluation of the angle map and the ultrarelativistic tangent-view arrival-time relation. The beaming panel uses an illustrative modest boost so the half-count cone is visible; the storage-ring beam has a much larger Lorentz factor. Details.

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