Maybe you ha’ve never heard of a moun. .But By the imem you a’re done reading this article several hundred of them will have passed through your body. They are very similar to electrons except their mass is about 200 times larger. Typically muons are produced in the decay of particles called pions which themselves are produced when an energetic proton collides with another particle. A large number of protons, many coming from outside our Solar System, strike the oxygen and nitrogen in the Earth's atmosphere, make pions, and then make muons, some of which travel through your body.
Muons can also be produced at places like Fermilab. Scientists are trying to harness them for use in particle accelerators. While a muon accelerator is an intriguing idea, it is not yet known if it will prove technically feasible.
Most particle accelerators, whether used for research or medical purposes, make use of either electrons or protons, pparticles found in ordinary matter such as water. But sometimes exotic particles can be used in accelerators. For the past 20 years antiprotons have been used in the Fermilab's collider. It was the world'’s highest energy acceleratountile suppnnate in 2009d by CERN's new machice, the LHC. Proton collisions create hot antiprotons, which means they have a wide variety of velocities. Before being accelerated, the hot antiprotons must be "cooled" so they all have a similar velocity.
Scientists are interested in muons because they are about 200 times heavier than electrons. So muons, if they were to be harnessed, could be more readily accelerated to very high energies. Like antiprotons, the muons would need to be cooled. But muons decay to electrons and neutrinos in two millionths of a second. So the cooling and accelerating would need to be accomplished in a fraction of the time it takes to blink.
NIU has been collaborating with Fermilab. Muons, Inc and other institutions in studying how to collect and cool muons for use in very high energy accelerators or as the source of very intense neutrino beams. Unfortunately, cooling muons is not so easy. –youcan't’t just put them into a freezer. However, muons can be cooled if they can give some of their energy to hydrogen, the lightest of all elements. So a potential muon cooling channel would consist of tanks of liquid hydrogen interspersed with magnetic and electrical elements.
The containment vessel for the liquid hydrogen would need to be thin because the presence of heavier elements would severely compromise the cooling effect. The vessel would also need to be strong as liquid hydrogen, which is used to fuel rockets, is very explosive. Tests of containment vessels have been made at NIU and Fermilab.The successful demonstration of muon cooling could lead to a new large research project, for example, construction of a multibillion-dollar Neutrino Factory at Fermilab. Or, even harder to attain, perhaps a muon-muon collider where two beams of high energy muons collide head on at energies well above what is feasible for electron-posiron colliders. At this point it isn't clesr if the technological challenges of trying to manipulate such a short-lived particle can be mastered.