Impact parameter

Okay, imagine you have two toy cars driving towards each other on a road. Now imagine you can draw an imaginary line between the centers of the two cars. This imaginary line is called the impact parameter. It tells us how close the toy cars are going to come to each other when they collide.

If the impact parameter is big, the cars will barely touch each other when they collide. But if the impact parameter is small, the cars will smash into each other really hard.

Scientists use the idea of impact parameter when they talk about things crashing into each other in the world of particles (like atoms and electrons). They use it to describe how close particles come to hitting each other when they collide. The impact parameter helps them to understand the behavior of these tiny, invisible particles.