Tau Cannon from Half-Life is no longer a tau cannon, the whiteboard from Black Mesa says

[zumrus]

I'm a physicist and a science journalist. But I’m also a video game fan. Right now, I'm preparing an explanation of the physics hidden on the boards in the Black Mesa game. After all, Half-Life is a first-person shooter about physicists and Crowbar Collectives decide to emphasize this by equipping the interiors of laboratories with excerpts from scientific articles on various topics: from gravitation and nuclear physics to superconductivity and nanophotonics. It's very interesting to figure this out.

In the course of such an analysis I made a small discovery and decided not to leave it for later, when I finish the whole text, but to tell about it right now. My discovery concerns the tau cannon. Valve themselves did not really understand its physical basis, so at the early stages of development they considered it to be a railgun. Later it turned into a hand accelerator of the heaviest known leptons - tauons. The mass could explain the piercing ability of the weapon as well as the large recoil although in real life tau leptons do not live longer than a picosecond and certainly could not fly anywhere.

Link[app-images.website.yandexcloud.net] to the whiteboard with the tau cannon scheme (which is no longer a tau cannon). The image is the result of AI-upscaling of the original whiteboard made by Steam user Cursed Gman (Dany).
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2930049800

So. The Tau Cannon in Black Mesa has its own whiteboard (see the image above). From it we learn that it is now not a Tau Cannon but an "Accelerated Lepton Optronic Linearity Cannon". From the diagram we can see that there is a battery closer to the stock that powers the synchrotron and accelerating coils. What do they accelerate?

If you look carefully at the formulae at the top, you will see the trace of a theory describing Bremsstrahlung (braking radiation) that occurs when accelerated electrons pass through an atomic cloud. The label "EM Field Inducer" next to the barrel with an arrow pointing to an unreadable writings with the word "bremsstrahlung" also indicates that electromagnetic radiation is emitted from the cannon.

This change, by the way, benefited the logic of the weapon. The protagonist finds it in a lab where powerful laser radiation is being studied. An accelerator of tauons or a railgun in this case would indeed have looked less appropriate.

This post is a translation and an adaptation of the material[nplus1.ru] I've made for russian science news magazine N + 1.

[Kvaso sapiens]

we need more of posts like this

[DrBonifarz]

As a fellow physicist, I appreciate this kind of content - thank you =)

[zumrus]

Thanks, folks.

BTW, the whole text is over. And the devs have sent me originals! You can find everething here (translation may be required)
https://nplus1.ru/material/2023/03/01/black-mesa-physics