Special Relativity – Why Relativistic Calculation is Needed Unless pc is Much Smaller Than the Rest Energy of a Particle

special-relativitywave-particle-duality

After introducing the de Broglie wavelength equation, my textbook gives a rather simple example where it asks to find the kinetic energy of a proton whose de Broglie wavelength is 1 fm. In the solution to this problem, it states that "A relativistic calculation is needed unless $pc$ for the proton is much smaller than the proton rest
energy."

Could someone please explain why this is the necessary condition? I'm not sure what the quantity '$pc$' represents or means here. I know that for massless particles like photons, the total energy $E$ is equal to $pc$. I'm not sure what it means for particles having rest mass like protons.

Best Answer

In relativity, the energy $E$ of a particle is related to its mass $m$ and momentum $p$ by \begin{equation} E = \sqrt{m^2c^4 + p^2 c^2 } \end{equation} Now let's think about the non-relativistic limit, $c\rightarrow \infty$. To do this, we will expand the square root
\begin{equation} E = m c^2 \sqrt{1 + \frac{p^2}{m^2 c^2}} = mc^2 + \frac{p^2}{2m} + \cdots \end{equation} where the $\cdots$ refer to terms that vanish in the limit $c\rightarrow\infty$.

The first term is the famous equation $E=mc^2$. In non-relativistic physics, the mass is a constant, so this is just a constant term in the energy we can ignore.

The second term $E=\frac{p^2}{2m}$ is the non-relativistic expression for kinetic energy.

You can see that non-relativistic physics is a good approximation to relativistic physics when we can ignore the higher order terms. Thinking back to how we expanded the square root, this amounts to the condition $p c \ll m c^2$.