There was a time when physicists where concerned about electron internal structu

Question

There was a time when physicists where concerned about electron internal structure. The rotating ring model was one of the proposals to explain how a charge density could become stable against electrostatic repulsion, by postulating that the charge is distributed as a ring with angular velocity, which engenders a magnetostatic force that exactly cancels the electrostatic repulsion (actually they don't exactly cancel, they both become equal to the centripetal force)

Now we don't concern ourselves with the electron internal structure anymore, but i wonder if there are other physical circumstances where we can still see a ring of charges to become stable against self-repulsion by this mechanism

One of the problems i see is that it is usually assumed in the analysis that the ring rotates at the speed of light. My question is:

Is possible to stabilize such structure by physical sub-light tangential velocities of the ring?

Explanation / Answer

My opinion is that stability can only be achieved by continuous feeding of energy to the electron ring, due to the loss of energy from synchrotron radiation. The higher the energy (velocity closer to c) the stronger the effect, that is why designs for circular rings for electron accelerators stopped at LEP energies.

At a Lorentz factor ( = particle energy/rest mass = [104.5 GeV/0.511 MeV]) of over 200,000, LEP still holds the particle accelerator speed record extremely close to the limiting speed of light

The next electron collider ILC will be linear.

Reading the wiki article on accelerators will enlighten you on the subject.

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