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Relativistic 2-body scattering and Mandelstam s

What you are seeing: compare a fixed-target experiment with a head-on collider for the same lab energy budget. The center-of-mass energy s\sqrt s grows only as Elab\sqrt{E_{lab}} for fixed target but linearly for symmetric colliders, justifying the LHC architecture.

Figure 1. Center-of-mass energy vs lab energy for fixed-target and collider geometries.
m1 (GeV)0.94
m2 (GeV)0.94
log10(E / GeV)3.00
geometry

WHAT TO TRY

  • Vary each control and watch the rail readouts respond.
  • Compare the diagnostic plot against the live scene.