Relativistic head-on elastic collision with a stationary target

ID: relativistic-head-on-elastic-collision-with-a-stationary-target

In units with , a particle of rest mass and total energy strikes a stationary target of rest mass . For the nontrivial one-dimensional elastic collision, reverse the incident momentum in the centre-of-mass frame and transform back to obtain the displayed outgoing projectile energy. The invariant squared total four-momentum is . If and , then . If , retaining arbitrary gives ; only the further fixed-, infinite-target-mass limit gives .

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