A Highschooler's Guide to GeV-range Electromagnetism

• DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.3520921
• Publication Date: 2019-10-28
• Authors: Shyam Wuppuluri; Aayush Desai; Pulkit Malhotra; Satchit Chatterji; Aditya Dwarkesh; Kiranbaskar Velmu...; Roshni Sahoo; Anushree Ganesh; Jinal Shah; Ameya Kunder
• Keywords: Electromagnetism

Reconstructing influential physical theories from scratch often helps in uncovering hitherto unknown logical connections and eliciting instructive empirical checkpoints within said theory. With this in mind, in the following article, a heuristic reconstruction of the Lorentz force equation is performed, and potentially interesting questions which come up are explored. In its most common form, the equation is written out as: \(\vec{F}=q\vec{E} +q\big(\vec{v}\times\vec{B}\big)\) Only the term that includes the magnetic field \(q\big(\vec{v}\times\vec{B}\big)\) will be dealt with for this article. The independent parameters we use are (i) the momentum of the particles in the beam, (ii) the charge (rather, the types) of particles, either positive or negative, and (iii) the current passing through a solenoid fixed in the path of the beam. We then measure the angle by which particles get deflected while varying these three parameters and derive an empirical relationship between them. NB: This is the research paper published by the team "Cryptic Ontics" of India, that has won the Beam Line for Schools competition organised by CERN in the year 2018.