Ultrarelativistic longitudinal Doppler factor

ID: ultrarelativistic-longitudinal-doppler-factor

For a forward photon and a positive collinear Lorentz transformation, the Doppler factor is . The identity gives the exact expression in the title. Expanding the square root by the binomial series gives . A leading approximation has relative error of order ; retaining a purported subleading term requires expanding all dependent quantities consistently. For example, has subleading term and is not the exact longitudinal Doppler factor.

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