11.7 Exercise 18

Plans for an accelerator that produces a secondary beam of K mesons to scatter from nuclei, for the purpose of studying the strong force, call for them to have a kinetic energy of 500 MeV. (a) What would the relativistic quantity $\gamma = \frac{1}{\sqrt{1 - v^{2} / c^{2}}}$ be for these particles? (b) How long would their average lifetime be in the laboratory? (c) How far could they travel in this time?