Posted: Dec 12, 2013 11:26 am
Adco wrote:I am thinking about photons. ...
What about when photons bump into each other? That must happen all the time. I guess nothing happens, they just carry on flying around until they get absorbed or reflected. OK, there's one answer sorted.
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Nope. http://physics.aps.org/synopsis-for/10. ... 111.080405
Despite what movie lightsabers suggest, light beams pass through each other without effect. However, two photons will, on rare occasion, bounce off each other. This elastic photon-photon scattering, which occurs via intermediate particles, has never been observed directly, but a new analysis in Physical Review Letters shows that the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN could detect around 20 photon-photon events per year...