Energy of a Single Particle

Introduction

In the previous sections, we have been learning about applying the Energy Principal in situations you may encounter in real life; a baseball is thrown, a moon orbits around a planet, two cars crash into one another. But now, we are going to look at something a bit more removed, but even more fundamental.

Single particles have energy associated with them. Calculating this energy is a lot like calculating the energy of bigger particles, but with something called a relativistic correction factor. This is notated with a "gamma" and is sometimes called the "Lorentz Factor". Exactly why this factor is needed can get into an explanation a bit beyond the scope of this course, but very basically, particles behave a bit differently when traveling near the speed of light.

That said, there are two types of energy a particle can have: rest energy and kinetic energy. Rest energy is, as you might expect, the energy of the rest mass of a particle. Kinetic energy, as we have seen before, is the energy associated with the motion of a particle. Calculations associated with these energies are usually very simple, so pay attention to the equations and units and you should be fine.

A Mathematical Model

There are three equations to look at that were discussed above:
(1) Rest Energy of a particle
(2) Kinetic Energy of a particle nearing the speed of light
(3) The combined energy equation