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Re: Pair production derivation



At 18:10 4/29/02 -0700, you wrote:
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Greetings Physics Teachers:
A colleague of mine is teaching Modern Physics out of the latest edition of
Beiser. He assigned problem out of Beiser that asked the students to
derive an equation for the minimum photon energy, in the presence of a
heavy particle, to create an electron positron pair. The derivation should
include consideration of both conservation of momentum and energy and the
result should include the mass of the heavy nucleus.

Since it has been a long time since we have seen this or done it ourselves,
we went looking for some assistance from textbooks. We have not been able
to find any text or website that completely does this derivation! Can any
of you help us with this derivation or point us to a readily available
source of this derivation? Thanks.

Ivan Rouse, Physics Professor
Physics Department, La Sierra University
4700 Pierce St., Riverside, CA 92515
email: irouse@lasierra.edu
phone: 909-785-2137, FAX 909-785-2215

Here's topic about which I know absolutely nothing. Fine!
Let's look for decay pathways with readily identifiable B and B-
products..... mmmm there's 63Eu152, 51Sb122, 49In144, 47Ag108, 35Br80,
33As74, 29Cu64.
Yes...well, that didn't get me very far, did it? I can read off the numbers
for all
of those species, but without some fragmentary insight into the pair
production
mechanism, looks like I can't bluster my way out of this one. Pity!