Research team achieves acceleration of positive muon to 100keV for the first time
A team of engineers and physicists from many institutions across Japan and working at the High Intensity Proton Accelerator Research Facility have demonstrated accelerating positive muons from thermal energy to 100 keV. This is the first time muons have been accelerated in a stable manner. The group published a paper describing their work on the arXiv preprint server.
Muons are subatomic particles similar to electrons. The main difference is their mass. Muons are 200 times heavier than electrons. They also have a much shorter lifespan. Physicists have long wanted to build muon colliders to conduct new types of physics research, including experiments that go beyond the Standard Model.
Unfortunately, such efforts have been hampered by the extremely short lifetime of muons, about 2 microseconds, after which they decay into electrons and neutrinos. To make things even more difficult, they tend to fly around haphazardly, making them very difficult to form into a single beam. In this new effort, the research team used new techniques to overcome such obstacles.
The researchers started by firing positively charged muons into a specially designed silica-based aerogel, similar to those used in insulation applications. When muons collided with electrons in the airgel, muonium μ+e- (an exotic atom consisting of a positive muon and an electron) was formed. The team then shot them with a laser to remove the electrons, forcing them back into positive muons, but their speed was significantly reduced.
The next step is to guide the decelerated muons into a radiofrequency cavity, where an electric field accelerates them to a final energy of 100 keV, about 4% of the speed of light.
Despite these achievements, the research team acknowledges that building a practical muon collider is still a distant goal. Their technology could play a role in such developments, but there are still problems that need to be solved, including how to scale the device to a usable size.
Further information: S. Aritome et al, Acceleration of positive muons through radio-frequency cavities, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2410.11367
Magazine information: arXiv
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Source: Research team achieves first-ever acceleration of positive muons to 100 keV (October 28, 2024) From https://phys.org/news/2024-10-team-positive-muons-kev.html Retrieved October 28, 2024
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