Muons. Medical search. Frequent questions

As with the decay of the non-elementary neutron (with a lifetime around 15 minutes), muon decay is slow (by subatomic standards) because the decay is mediated only by the weak interaction (rather than the more powerful strong interaction or electromagnetic interaction), and because the mass difference between the muon and the set of its decay products is small, providing few kinetic degrees of freedom for decay. (wikipedia.org)
For the first time, scientists working at the muon beam-line at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) ISIS Neutron and Muon Beam facility on the Harwell Campus in the UK, have observed ionization cooling. (gla.ac.uk)
0.5), we report herein the results of muon spin relaxation (muSR) and neutron powder diffraction measurements. (arxiv.org)

The new measurement from the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab strongly agrees with the value found at Brookhaven and diverges from theory with the most precise measurement to date. (symmetrymagazine.org)
Muons drew the attention of physicists around the world after an experiment at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, or Fermilab, in Illinois demonstrated that they're far more magnetic than expected. (discovermagazine.com)
Muons occur naturally when cosmic rays strike Earth's atmosphere, and particle accelerators at Fermilab can produce them in large numbers. (umass.edu)
Pinning down the subtle behavior of muons is a remarkable achievement that will guide the search for physics beyond the Standard Model for years to come," said Fermilab Deputy Director of Research Joe Lykken. (umass.edu)
Muon g-2 ring at Fermilab. (sciencealert.com)
A new measurement of the muon g-2 has been recently reported by the Fermilab Muon g-2 collaboration and shows a 4.2σ departure from the Standard Model (SM) prediction. (cam.ac.uk)

The muon is an unstable subatomic particle with a mean lifetime of 2.2 μs, much longer than many other subatomic particles. (wikipedia.org)
Muon decay almost always produces at least three particles, which must include an electron of the same charge as the muon and two types of neutrinos. (wikipedia.org)
Like all elementary particles, the muon has a corresponding antiparticle of opposite charge (+1 e) but equal mass and spin: the antimuon (also called a positive muon). (wikipedia.org)
In all cases the information about the absorption of the muons was used as a measure of the thickness of the material crossed by the cosmic ray particles. (wikipedia.org)
The more than 5,000 detectors above ground watch for the ensemble of particles raining down after both cosmic ray strikes and gamma ray strikes, while the more than 1,000 underground detectors sense only muons. (dictionary.com)
The behavior of the muon is well understood, but its role as one of the elementary particles is unknown. (dictionary.com)
Could subatomic particles called muons help us navigate through GPS-denied Arctic waters? (rcinet.ca)
Superfast, subatomic-sized particles called muons have been used to wirelessly navigate underground in a reportedly world first. (u-tokyo.ac.jp)
The Muon g-2 experiment has begun its search for phantom particles with its well-traveled electromagnet. (symmetrymagazine.org)
The muon-the short-lived cousin of the electron-could be the key to understanding relationships between other fundamental particles. (symmetrymagazine.org)
Sometimes known as "fat electrons," muons are similar to their more widely-known cousins but are 200 times heavier and radioactively unstable - decaying in mere millionths of a second into electrons and tiny, ghostly, chargeless particles known as neutrinos . (livescience.com)
Those exotic particles and the associated energies, the idea goes, would be nudging and tugging at the muons inside the ring. (livescience.com)
But when the theorists calculate the same quantity, using all of the known forces and particles in the Standard Model, we don't get the same answer," Renee Fatemi, a physicist at the University of Kentucky and the simulations manager for the Muon g-2 experiment, said in a statement . (livescience.com)
Although, according to some of the novel theories of the day, new particles like the neutrino and the positron were expected, what actually showed up was a complete weirdo: the unstable muon. (bigthink.com)
AMHERST, Mass. - The long-awaited first results from the Muon g-2 experiment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory show fundamental particles called muons behaving in a way that is not predicted by scientists' best theory, the Standard Model of particle physics. (umass.edu)
As the muons circulate in the Muon g-2 magnet, they also interact with a quantum foam of subatomic particles popping in and out of existence. (umass.edu)
Interactions with these short-lived particles affect the value of the g-factor, causing the muons' precession to speed up or slow down very slightly. (umass.edu)
But if the quantum foam contains additional forces or particles not accounted for by the Standard Model, that would tweak the muon g-factor further. (umass.edu)
However, as muons are unstable particles such a machine will be accompanied with technological challenges for a collider experiment: an unprecedented amount of secondary and tertiary decay products will enter the detector volume. (aps.org)
With the Muon g-2 Collaboration confirming g-2's number based on multiple runs of Fermilab's particle accelerator in 2019 and 2020, we can be twice as certain of the existence of new particles and forces that we are yet to identify. (sciencealert.com)
Muons are fundamental particles, much like the electron but 207 times more massive, so the total effective energy carried by the muons in a muon accelerator can be used to create new particles in the muon collisions. (gla.ac.uk)
A muon collider could then replace the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) and create a ten-fold increase in effective energy for the creation of new particles. (gla.ac.uk)
Muons are created from the decays of other subatomic particles, called pions, but these decays occupy a large volume compared to the beam pipes used to channel the particles in the accelerator. (gla.ac.uk)
The Muon g-2 Collaboration is rooted in a historic 1998 experiment that stunned the physics world by indicating that muons' magnetic field deviates significantly from the Standard Model, which is used to explain the laws that govern fundamental particles. (cornell.edu)
While both particles have their own magnetic field, muons are far more unstable and decay in a few millionths of a second. (cornell.edu)

Formerly, muons were called mu mesons, but are not classified as mesons by modern particle physicists , and that name is no longer used by the physics community. (wikipedia.org)
The best explanation, physicists say, is that the muon is being influenced by forms of matter and energy that are not yet known to science, but which may nevertheless affect the nature and evolution of the universe. (dictionary.com)
Here's how physicists calculate g-2, the value that will determine whether the muon is giving us a sign of new physics. (symmetrymagazine.org)
The discovery of the muon originally confounded physicists. (symmetrymagazine.org)
The best explanation, according to physicists, is that the muon is being pushed about by types of matter and energy completely unknown to physics. (livescience.com)
But today's results, which came from an experiment in which physicists sent muons whizzing around a superconducting magnetic ring, seem to show that the muon is wobbling far more than it should be. (livescience.com)
Still, nothing could have prepared physicists for the discovery of the muon: an unstable particle with the same charge, but hundreds of times the mass, of the electron. (bigthink.com)
The strength of the internal magnet determines the rate that the muon precesses in an external magnetic field and is described by a number that physicists call the g-factor. (umass.edu)
Physicists have a pretty good idea of how muons should move in an electromagnetic field. (sciencealert.com)

Due to their greater mass, muons accelerate slower than electrons in electromagnetic fields, and emit less bremsstrahlung (deceleration radiation). (wikipedia.org)
This allows muons of a given energy to penetrate far deeper into matter because the deceleration of electrons and muons is primarily due to energy loss by the bremsstrahlung mechanism. (wikipedia.org)
Like electrons, muons act as if they have a tiny internal magnet. (umass.edu)
In this work, we investigate an asymmetry of the emitted electrons when the initial muon bound by the nucleus is polarized. (sissa.it)
Muons are similar to electrons but are more than 200 times more massive. (cornell.edu)
Protons and electrons live forever and neutrons, when not safely tucked up in an atomic nucleus, can only last fifteen minutes, but every other particle is quite substantially more fleeting even than the muon. (andrewsteele.co.uk)
Events with two same-sign leptons (electrons or muons) and at least two jets, as well as events with three charged leptons, are selected. (bvsalud.org)
The event selection requires the two leptons to have opposite charge, the same flavor (electrons or muons), and a large invariant mass. (bvsalud.org)

Muons have a mass of 105.66 MeV/c2, which is approximately 206.7682830(46) times that of the electron, me. (wikipedia.org)
As with the other charged leptons, the muon has an associated muon neutrino, denoted by ν μ, which differs from the electron neutrino and participates in different nuclear reactions. (wikipedia.org)
The muon is unstable, eventually undergoing a radioactive decay into an electron. (dictionary.com)
Building experimental evidence suggests that the electron, muon and tau may feel different forces. (symmetrymagazine.org)
The field of particle physics has a new and improbable star: the muon, which is sometimes referred to as a fat electron. (discovermagazine.com)
A muon is about 200 times as massive as its cousin, the electron. (umass.edu)
Experiments on the distinctive wobble of a heavyweight cousin to the electron called the muon are repeatedly finding something isn't quite adding up, pointing the way towards unknown physics. (sciencealert.com)
A muon is a subatomic particle, like an electron but for two minor differences: it's 207 times heavier, and radioactive. (andrewsteele.co.uk)
We perform a search for muon neutrino to electron neutrino oscillations, a process which would manifest a nonzero value of the theta-13 mixing angle, in the MINOS long-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment. (caltech.edu)

In this talk we describe the challenge, present the initial detector concept and full simulation studies of data reconstruction performance, and demonstrate that high quality physics is possible in the muon collider environment. (aps.org)
Higgs decays to second generation fermions is only possible in the muon channel since the expected backgrounds for charm and strange quarks is far too large at the LHC. (qmul.ac.uk)

From unexplained tracks in a balloon-borne experiment to cosmic rays on Earth, the unstable muon was particle physics' biggest surprise. (bigthink.com)
I still miss Muon and my feelings are unstable because I could not cry for him when he was taken away. (dccam.org)

Evidence taken from the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory near Chicago appears to point to a miniscule subatomic particle known as the muon wobbling far more than theory predicts it should. (livescience.com)
The reduced size of the muon bunches in the accelerator could be harnessed to cross each other and create a large enough number of collisions in a muon collider to explore fundamental questions in the study of subatomic matter. (gla.ac.uk)
Muons' longevity is quite impressive for a subatomic particle-they live an average of two millionths of a second. (andrewsteele.co.uk)

In this experiment, which Luis Walter Alvarez called the "start of modern particle physics" in 1968 his Nobel lecture, they showed that the muons from cosmic rays were decaying without being captured by atomic nuclei, contrary to what expected by the mediator of the nuclear force postulated by Yukawa. (wikipedia.org)
The Pierre Auger Observatory has detected more muons from cosmic-ray showers than predicted by the most up-to-date particle-physics models. (aps.org)
The results , published in April by the Muon g-2 collaboration (pronounced "g minus two"), run counter to the predictions of the top available particle physics theory. (discovermagazine.com)
Muons are also crucial to particle physics. (andrewsteele.co.uk)

The existence of the muon was confirmed in 1937 by J. C. Street and E. C. Stevenson's cloud chamber experiment. (wikipedia.org)
The fact that the mesotron (i.e. the muon) was not Yukawa's particle was established in 1946 by an experiment conducted by Marcello Conversi, Oreste Piccioni, and Ettore Pancini in Rome. (wikipedia.org)
In 2001, an experiment hinted that one property of the muon was not exactly as the standard model predicted, but new studies were needed to confirm. (dictionary.com)
Follow the saga of the Muon g-2 experiment. (symmetrymagazine.org)
The 50-foot-wide electromagnet for the Muon g-2 experiment has completed its five-week journey from New York to Illinois. (symmetrymagazine.org)
The experiment uses a muon beamline, electronic racks and superconducting magnetic storage ring cooled to minus 450 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 267 degrees Celsius) to study the wobble of muons. (livescience.com)
Today is an extraordinary day, long awaited not only by us but by the whole international physics community," Graziano Venanzoni, co-spokesperson of the Muon g-2 experiment and physicist at the Italian National Institute for Nuclear Physics, said in a statement . (livescience.com)
The international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) collaboration, who carried out the research, consists of many scientists from around the world, including a team from the University of Glasgow led by Professor Paul Soler, who is also the UK Principal Investigator on the project. (gla.ac.uk)
This experiment studies the precession (or wobble) of muons as they travel through the magnetic field. (cornell.edu)
That accuracy was demonstrated Aug. 10 when the collaboration, comprising 181 scientists from 33 institutions in seven countries, announced that it had doubled the precision of the muon measurement to 0.20 parts per million, confirming the findings of the first experiment run reported in 2021 . (cornell.edu)
The team had introduced a number of techniques during the analysis of the first experiment run that other groups have since adopted, such as how to correct for "pile up" - when the positrons that result from muon decay end up in the same place in the detector and confuse the algorithm that attempts to reconstruct them. (cornell.edu)
DELPHI was an experiment at CERN's LEP collider, and the group was in charge of its hadron calorimeter (HCAL) and surrounding muon chambers (SMC). (lu.se)

For example, so-called secondary muons, created by cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere, can penetrate the atmosphere and reach Earth's land surface and even into deep mines. (wikipedia.org)
The muon flux at the Earth's surface is such that a single muon passes through an area the size of a human hand per second. (wikipedia.org)
Each second, about 100 billion neutrinos from the sun pass through your thumbnail, and you're bathed in a rain of muons, birthed in Earth's atmosphere. (dictionary.com)
The only ones which live long enough to make it to the Earth's surface are the muons. (andrewsteele.co.uk)

IceCube Collaboration (2022): Density of GeV muons in air showers measured with IceTop - Public data release. (wisc.edu)
With more than 200 scientists from 35 institutions in seven countries, the Muon g-2 collaboration has now finished analyzing the motion of more than 8 billion muons from that first run. (umass.edu)
Nearly 20 years after researchers from Brookhaven Particle Accelerator in New York first provided evidence of an anomaly , hundreds of scientists working with the Muon g-2 Collaboration have just announced the latest measurement of the muon's motion in an electromagnetic field. (sciencealert.com)
The MICE Collaboration developed a completely new method to cool the beam of muons created by the ISIS accelerator. (gla.ac.uk)

A Muon Collider with the centre-of-mass energy of 3 to 10 TeV has gained a lot of interest in the recent years thanks to its unique combination of high energy reach, clean final states and low environmental footprint. (aps.org)
A muon collider could be the answer. (gla.ac.uk)
In a breakthrough paper, published in Nature today, researchers describe how the main stumbling block for the realisation of a muon collider was overcome. (gla.ac.uk)
This new research demonstrates that ionization cooling reduces the transverse size of the beam and its lateral motion at the expected level, thereby giving confidence that a muon collider could become a viable accelerator. (gla.ac.uk)

The elusive, exotic neutrino has been observed while in the process of changing from a muon neutrino into. (sdentertainer.com)

The method follows the same magic-momentum storage ring concept used at BNL, and pioneered previously at CERN, but muon beam preparation, storage ring internal hardware, field measuring equipment, and detector and electronics systems are all new or upgraded significantly. (epj-conferences.org)
The Compact Muon Solenoid at CERN is looking for the Higgs boson-the most elusive particle in modern physics-specifically by looking for the muons it would produce when it decays. (andrewsteele.co.uk)

In technical terms, its "magnetic moment" - a property that essentially causes the muons to spin, or wobble, like bar magnets - was surprisingly large. (discovermagazine.com)
The teeny-tiny wobble of the muon - created by the interaction of its intrinsic magnetic field , or magnetic moment, with an external magnetic field - could shake the very foundations of science. (livescience.com)
Muons also have a property called spin which, when combined with their charge, makes them behave as if they were tiny magnets, causing them to wobble like little gyroscopes when plopped inside a magnetic field . (livescience.com)

Muon tomography or muography is a technique that uses cosmic ray muons to generate two or three-dimensional images of volumes using information contained in the Coulomb scattering of the muons. (wikipedia.org)
Twenty years after Carl David Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer discovered that muons were generated from cosmic rays in 1936, Australian physicist E.P. George made the first known attempt to measure the areal density of the rock overburden of the Guthega-Munyang tunnel (part of the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme) with cosmic ray muons. (wikipedia.org)
Cosmic-ray muons fall equally across the Earth and always travel at the same speed regardless of what matter they traverse, penetrating even kilometers of rock," explained Professor Hiroyuki Tanaka from Muographix at the University of Tokyo. (u-tokyo.ac.jp)
Using its giant array of particle detectors, the Pierre Auger Observatory in Argentina has found that more muons arrive on the ground from cosmic-ray showers than expected from models using LHC data as input [ 1 ]. (aps.org)

Because muons have a greater mass and energy than the decay energy of radioactivity, they are not produced by radioactive decay. (wikipedia.org)
These interactions usually produce pi mesons initially, which almost always decay to muons. (wikipedia.org)
Since muons are less likely to interact, stop and decay in low density matter than high density matter, a larger number of muons will travel through the low density regions of target objects in comparison to higher density regions. (wikipedia.org)
Lower-energy charged pions decay before interacting again and produce muons, which largely survive to the ground. (aps.org)

The muon g-2 ring sits in its detector hall amidst electronics racks, the muon beamline and other equipment at the U.S. Department of Energy's Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. (cornell.edu)

Muons were discovered by Carl D. Anderson and Seth Neddermeyer at Caltech in 1936 while studying cosmic radiation. (wikipedia.org)

This data release accompanies results submitted to Physical Review D describing the measurement of the density of GeV muons with IceTop. (wisc.edu)

the positively charged muon is the antiparticle of the negatively charged muon. (dictionary.com)

This infographic displays a number of essential properties, facts, and anecdotes about the muon: the first fundamental particle ever discovered that plays no role in the behavior of conventional matter found on Earth. (bigthink.com)

One way to find the Higgs would be to catch it decaying into four muons, which is something no other particle yet known can do. (andrewsteele.co.uk)

Muons fall constantly and frequently around the world (about 10,000 per square meter per minute) and can't be tampered with. (u-tokyo.ac.jp)
In fact, about 10,000 muons hit every square metre of the Earth every minute, so there are a few going through you every second as you read this! (andrewsteele.co.uk)

The discovery of ionization cooling in this paper shows that it is possible to channel enough muons into a small enough volume to be able to accelerate the muons. (gla.ac.uk)

This way the scientists can generate a beam of muons that they can study, instead of a diffuse shower. (dictionary.com)
In contrast, J-PARC E34 will employ a novel approach based on injection of an ultra-cold, low-energy, muon beam injected into a small, but highly uniform magnet. (epj-conferences.org)
After cooling the beam, the muons can be accelerated using standard radio-frequency (RF) cavities up to their required energy. (gla.ac.uk)

A collection of works stretching from low- to three-dimensional magnetism are presented, studied mostly through muon spin rotation, relaxation and resonance (µ +SR). The theoretical background of this technique is outlined in Chapter 2, which introduces the subject from the muon particle as an astro[1]nomical particle to how they are produced here on Earth. (kth.se)

In this talk, we will discuss a SUSY realization of this mechanism and its impact on the muon g-2 anomaly. (cam.ac.uk)

Given the specific properties of weak particle interactions, previous generations of scientists developed the technique of µ +SR. Special care is taken to explain how the anti-muon interacts with magnetic fields and the resulting behaviour of the anti-muon in a given magnetic field configuration. (kth.se)

CLIC Workshop 2016 (18-January 22, 2016): Magnetized muon absorbers. (cern.ch)

The possibility of unexplained muon phenomena first arose in 2001, when similar experiments at the Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York found something amiss: When shot through a magnetic field in a 50-foot-diameter accelerator, the tiny particle did not act as anticipated. (discovermagazine.com)

I report on the progress of two new muon anomalous magnetic moment experiments, which are in advanced design and construction phases. (epj-conferences.org)

Muon tomography imagers are under development for the purposes of detecting nuclear material in road transport vehicles and cargo containers for the purposes of non-proliferation. (wikipedia.org)
Although the muon does not experience nuclear forces, it can interact weakly with nuclei. (dictionary.com)
Muon-catalyzed fusion is a very efficient nuclear fusion method to which a wide variety of experimental and theoretical studies have been devoted in recent years. (tubitak.gov.tr)
The most important issue of reducing the efficiency of the muon-catalyzed fusion chain in pure deuterium mixtures is the probability of muons sticking to the helium-3 particle produced after the $d-d$ nuclear fusion reaction. (tubitak.gov.tr)

Muons produced in Extensive Air Showers (EAS) generate ring-like images in Imaging Atmospheric Cherenkov Telescopes when travelling near parallel to the optical axis. (harvard.edu)

Muography uses muons by tracking the number of muons that pass through the target volume to determine the density of the inaccessible internal structure. (wikipedia.org)
In this investigation, the density dependence of the slowing down, muon stripping, and effective sticking in pure deuterium fuel are presented by considering all possible effective processes and solving a set of coupled differential equations. (tubitak.gov.tr)

This blur of objects push and trip the muon in subtle ways that cause its boogaloo to go askew. (sciencealert.com)

Another application is the usage of muon tomography to monitor potential underground sites used for carbon sequestration. (wikipedia.org)

MUON is a truly remarkable feat of sound-engineering and cutting-edge design. (unilet.net)

David Flay examines the Muon g-2 plunging probe installation. (umass.edu)

By using muon-detecting ground stations synchronized with an underground muon-detecting receiver, researchers at the University of Tokyo were able to calculate the receiver's position in the basement of a six-story building. (u-tokyo.ac.jp)

Neutron3

Fermilab6

Particles25

Physicists9

Electrons8

Electron9

Possible in the muon2

Unstable2

Subatomic3

Particle physics4

Experiment12

Earth's4

Collaboration4

Collider4

Neutrino1

CERN2

Wobble3

Cosmic ray4

Decay4

Beamline1

Seth Neddermeyer1

Measurement1

Negatively charged1

Fundamental particle1

Higgs1

10,0002

Accelerate1

Beam3

Relaxation1

Anomaly1

Scientists1

20161

20011

Experiments1

Nuclear4

Generate1

Density2

Subtle1

Carbon1

Remarkable1

Probe1

Researchers1