Scientists know the Higgs boson interacts with extremely massive particles. Now, they’re starting to study how it interacts with lighter particles as well.
muons
From the Department of Energy, Aug. 11, 2020: Fermilab scientist Chris Polly shares his love of physics, the importance of muons, a short history of scientists’ quest to measure how the muon wobbles in a magnetic field, and his journey to becoming leader of the Muon g-2 experiment.
Cornell University postdoc David Sweigart has won the 2020 URA Thesis Award for his dissertation analyzing the first year’s data from Fermilab’s Muon g-2 experiment. His efforts in analyzing the anomalous precession frequency of the muon could help confirm or challenge the Standard Model of particle physics.
The ATLAS and CMS experiments at CERN have announced new results that show that the Higgs boson decays into two muons. US CMS — the United States contingent of the global CMS collaboration — played a crucial role in this result, contributing to the excellent performance of CMS detector.
The discovery of the muon originally confounded physicists. Today international experiments are using the previously perplexing particle to gain a new understanding of our world.
An international team of theoretical physicists have published their calculation of the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon. Their work expands on a simple yet richly descriptive equation that revolutionized physics almost a century ago and that may aid scientists in the discovery of physics beyond the Standard Model. Now the world awaits the result from the Fermilab Muon g-2 experiment.
From Argonne National Laboratory, May 5, 2020: Using Argonne’s supercomputer Mira, researchers have come up with newly precise calculations aimed at understanding a key gap between physics theory and measurements by the Muon g-2 experiment
From Inside Science, Feb. 5, 2020: The next generation of particle physics just got a whole lot closer. Scientists at the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment have developed a revolutionary new process that, for the first time, makes a muon particle collider within reach. Fermilab scientist Vladimir Shiltsev comments on how muon ionization cooling is a linchpin in demonstrating the technical feasibility of muon colliders.
From Science News, Feb. 5, 2020: A new experiment raises prospects for building a particle accelerator that collides particles called muons, which could lead to smashups of higher energies than any engineered before. Fermilab scientist Vladimir Shiltsev comments on how scientists with the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, have cooled a beam of muons, a necessary part of preparing the particles for use in a collider, the team reports online Feb. 5 in Nature.
From Scientific American, Feb. 5, 2020: The best-laid plans of MICE and muons did not go awry: Physicists at the International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, collaboration have achieved their years-long goal of quickly sapping energy from muons. The results are the first demonstration of ionization cooling, a technique which could allow researchers to control muons for future collider applications — an epochal achievement, according to Fermilab physicist Vladimir Shiltsev.