4 ms·

Interesting, maybe a physicist could clear up for me if they broke the so-called Schwinger limit (so they had an electrical field so big EM started behaving non

Interesting, maybe a physicist could clear up for me if they broke the so-called Schwinger limit (so they had an electrical field so big EM started behaving nonlinearly). I am still confused about what this limit means. Do you need a big enough intensity to get nonlinearity (as the wiki for Scheinger limit seems to indicate)? Or sufficient frequency/energy (as the paper seems to indicate)? And isn't the EM field already nonlinear since we see such things as spontaneous emission and, in general, interaction with all charged particles? Sorry for throwing my questions at you

foxyv 5y ago
They are throwing relativistic, highly charged gold ions at each other. Then when the gold atoms barely miss, the cloud of insanely high energy photons streaming off of them merge in the area between them. Intensity of photons is going to be start of the universe high. Frequency caused by doppler shift and monstrous energy levels will also be insanely high. At those speeds, the blackbody radiation from a 1 pound rubber duck from your bathtub would be doppler shifted into the gamma range. In addition, due to the velocity of the duck, they would stack up in front of it in a huge wave of such intensity that it would create cosmic background that would herald the arrival of your duck with the intensity of a megaton nuclear bomb.