muons

From University of Virginia Today, March 7, 2023: University of Virginia physicists shipped the last truckload of five large, specialized panels that contain the detector that will form the shell of the international Muon-to-electron Conversion Experiment, or Mu2e experiment. UVA professors, technicians, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students and undergrads have worked on a total of 83 detector modules, each weighing as much as 2,000 pounds, totaling about 160,000 pounds of materials.

From Big Think, March 4, 2023: Researchers in Japan have effectively used muon tomography to X-ray the Great Pyramid in Egypt finding an unknown tunnel in the structure. This new tool used in archeology is detailed in a new paper published in Nature Communications.

From Popular Science, Feb. 3, 2023: Recently, researchers created a full 3D muon image of a nuclear reactor the size of a large building which provides a safer way of inspecting old reactors or checking on nuclear waste. Scientists can collect muons to paint images of objects as if they were X-rays. Fermilab’s Alan Bross and a team of researchers are working to use this same technology to image the inside of the Great Pyramid of Giza.

From MSN (Spain), May 26, 2022: A series of precise measurements of well-known ordinary particles and processes have threatened to shake our understanding of physics from the Muon g-2 and W boson Fermilab announcements . Now the LHC is preparing to operate at a higher energy level and intensity than ever before, there is a chance that new particles are produced through even rarer processes or are hidden under backgrounds that we have not yet unearthed.

From NBC News, May 4, 2022: A new research initiative that includes Fermilab scientist Alan Bross plans to scan Egypt’s Great Pyramid of Giza using energetic particles from space. The new device is a high-powered telescope to map the Great Pyramid’s internal makeup from all angles and could help scientists “see” inside the ancient structure to glean new details about its mysterious inner chambers.

From Science News, April 22, 2022: A more detailed survey of the Great Pyramid is being planned by a team of researchers who will place much larger detectors than previously used outside the pyramid measuring muons from multiple angles. The results will provide a 3-D view of what’s inside in the Great Pyramid, says Fermilab particle physicist Alan Bross.

For the Muon g-2 experiment, researchers create billions of muons to study their surprising properties.

The Mu2e experiment at Fermilab will look for a never-before-seen subatomic phenomenon that, if observed, would transform our understanding of elementary particles: the direct conversion of a muon into an electron. An international collaboration of over 200 scientists is building the Mu2e precision particle detector that will hunt for new physics beyond the Standard Model.

From Live Science, March 14, 2022: Fermilab’s Alan Bross is leading a team planning to scan the Great Pyramid of Giza, the largest pyramid ever constructed in ancient Egypt. The team will use powerful scans to analyze muons in greater detail aiming to answer the question of what exists in two mysterious voids in the pyramid.

From The Big Think, January 6, 2022: Particle physics needs a new collider to supersede the Large Hadron Collider. Muons, not electrons or protons, might hold the key.