Eli5 – if light effects other light… Say if you had a beam of light, and you shon another beam of light through the first beam perpendicularly, would the first beam be affected, and if so, how?

Question

Eli5 – if light effects other light… Say if you had a beam of light, and you shon another beam of light through the first beam perpendicularly, would the first beam be affected, and if so, how?

In: Physics

Answer 1

There is an effect called photon-photon-scattering (or light by light/ Halpern scattering) A small fraction of light would be scattered in somewhat random directions, like if you shot 2 baseball machines perpendicular and evey millionth shot two collide and shoot off in random directions.

Since this is rare enough you’d mostly see them going through each other without any effect.