How 'MICE' Brings a Muon Collider Closer To Reality (symmetrymagazine.org) 15
"Scientists have announced a breakthrough that could be key to the creation of a powerful new kind of particle collider," reports the Fermilab/SLAC magazine Symmetry.
Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: As reported in the journal Nature, the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, has for the first time demonstrated the successful taming of a beam of particles called muons through a process called transverse ionization cooling, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles...
Muons — which are heavy relatives of electrons — are interesting to accelerator scientists for a number of reasons. For one, they are more massive than the particles they have traditionally used in colliders. The more massive the particles you collide, the higher the energies you can reach with your collisions, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles... Scientists have thus far stuck to colliding particles such as protons, antiprotons, electrons, positrons and ions. One reason for this is the difficulty of producing a sufficient amount of muons and funneling them into an organized beam for an accelerator to propel and collide...
MICE scientists passed a beam of muons through an absorber, slowing down their momentum perpendicular to the beam direction and focusing them into a tight beam. They then used radio-frequency cavities to speed up the momentum of the beam in the forward direction. They repeated this until they were left with a focused, well-behaved beam of muons traveling the right way.
The scientists undertook the difficult task of measuring each particle one-by-one to evaluate their efforts. They found that they had achieved what they set out to do, bringing scientists a step closer to potentially making a muon collider a reality.
Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shared their report: As reported in the journal Nature, the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, has for the first time demonstrated the successful taming of a beam of particles called muons through a process called transverse ionization cooling, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles...
Muons — which are heavy relatives of electrons — are interesting to accelerator scientists for a number of reasons. For one, they are more massive than the particles they have traditionally used in colliders. The more massive the particles you collide, the higher the energies you can reach with your collisions, and the more potential you have to make discoveries as that energy converts into new particles... Scientists have thus far stuck to colliding particles such as protons, antiprotons, electrons, positrons and ions. One reason for this is the difficulty of producing a sufficient amount of muons and funneling them into an organized beam for an accelerator to propel and collide...
MICE scientists passed a beam of muons through an absorber, slowing down their momentum perpendicular to the beam direction and focusing them into a tight beam. They then used radio-frequency cavities to speed up the momentum of the beam in the forward direction. They repeated this until they were left with a focused, well-behaved beam of muons traveling the right way.
The scientists undertook the difficult task of measuring each particle one-by-one to evaluate their efforts. They found that they had achieved what they set out to do, bringing scientists a step closer to potentially making a muon collider a reality.
Nice, how much longer until .. (Score:1)
... we open a portal into Hell, and Doom becomes the new reality?
news for nerds, the real deal (Score:2)
Let me try and be the first to say that this is some kick-ass news for nerds :-)
muon ray guns !
i'm sure it will be a long road to a muon collider, but it's still very exciting to think about the fact that this could bring new physics, or even just confirmation of existing physics (which is still important).
And bonus nerd points for the fact that relativistic speeds makes the muon "last longer".
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LOL.
Sadly it took me a second before I got that.
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Re:muon mass vs proton (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, but, Protons are composite particles, consisting of 3-quarks (or a quark soup depending on how you look at it) so collisions between Protons/Anti-Protons tend to strike effectively glancing blows and so the collisions are very inelastic. Muons, however, like Electrons (and other leptons), are fundamental particles with no known internal structure or components (they are equivalent to quarks in that regard) and so collisions between electron/positron or muon/anti-muon will almost perfectly aniliate and are much more elastic collisions (compared to protons), so, a larger percentage of the momentum in converted into collision energy. As a result, though muons are less massive than protons, because they are atomic rather than composite particles, a larger portion of there energy is converted in the collisions. This makes them more useful for studying high-energy collisions.
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Fusion? (Score:2)
Muon catalyzed fusion is a thing, so this research might not be purely intellectual. I'm curious what their Muon source is.
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Muon catalyzed fusion is a thing, so this research might not be purely intellectual. I'm curious what their Muon source is.
pp pion production and decay.
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Sure, been a thing since the 1950s... but a muon takes 6 GeV to make and only lasts 2 microseconds, so any muon source takes an obscene amount of energy to make compared to what you'll get out it via fusion.
It's not a way to generate electricity, it's a way to consume a lot of electricity.
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Not if you want it to catalyze fusion. But, other than the inefficiency of creating muons, the big limiting factor isn't the muon lifetime, it's the fact that the muons sometimes get stuck to the helium product and stop catalyzing further reactions.
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that only happens 0.3% to 0.5% the time by more recent analysis. Still combined with huge energy requirement makes muon fusion useless for power generation
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The problem with muon catalyzed fusion is you need to slow the muons down to where they can bind with protons, which means the somewhat short time you have until one decays is a real problem. In theory you could re-use each muon a few times, but you have to slow it down each time and it seems an intractable problem.
For a collider, you're speeding up the muons, and so you naturally get a longer lifetime (in our reference frame). The closer to the speed of light you accelerate them, the longer you have to u