4 ms·
Experiment reveals evidence for a previously unseen behaviour of light
- raattgift 9y agoIn this article Joe Butterworth (of the University College London's High Energy Physics Group) writes an excellent example of what science journalism should be. I think he does a very good job in explaining the distinction between inelastic and elastic photon-photon scattering. (Unfortunately he also refers to photon-proton work he's done in the past, so maybe he's right to revert to light-light scattering later in the article, and perhaps should have done that almost from the beginning as an aid for the casual reader.) (A précis might be: when looking at a point fixed in space relative to you, a pair of high-momentum photons with well-defined trajectories through that point can interact at or very close to that point with the result that the two photons will have new trajectories but unchanged momenta.)