What happens when you collide protons with electrons in a super collider?

lundyjb

Does it just burst into vast amounts of energy? Or what about colliding two electrons together. higgs boson?

Simon Bridge

generally:
p+e -> n + energy. (if they don't scatter)

But see:
http://www.desy.de/f/hera/engl/chap2.html
... at very high energies the electron can interact at the quark level and you get mesons etc.
You learn a lot about the structure of the proton... so it is a decent question.


electrons just scatter off each other
e+e -> e+e
... no evidence of internal structure to the electron, if that is what you are thinking.
But see:
http://prd.aps.org/abstract/PRD/v48/i9/p4467_1
... so there is still interesting physics to see.

Drakkith

At very high energy the particles collide and the energy of the collision is used to create other particles. By the way there is no such thing as "pure energy". The closest thing would be light, which has no mass, but is still considered to be a particle and possesses momentum.

We cannot collide higgs bosons together at this time. They don't live long enough before decaying. They are also uncharged, so we couldn't accelerate them even if we could get around the lifetime problem.

Khashishi

The result of any particular impact is randomly chosen among all possible reactions, so you can get all sorts of energetic particles if you use enough energy.