Particle accelerators, like the famous Large Hadron Collider (LHC), help reveal the origin of matter and understand the makeup of the universe. Scientists use these giant machines to find answers related to subatomic particles, dark matter, energy, antimatter, and more.
Inside Particle acceleratorCharged particles, such as protons and electrons, travel at extremely high speeds. These fast-moving particles collide with targets or with each other. By studying the results of these collisions, scientists can learn about the fundamental building blocks of matter and the forces that hold them together.
However, particle accelerators present several challenges, including being very expensive to build and requiring a large amount of space to operate.
Interestingly, physicists have long known Muon Using (subatomic particles similar to electrons but with much greater mass) instead of ions, protons and electrons can make particle accelerators more powerful, cheaper and smaller.
The challenge with this approach, however, was finding a practical way to harness the muons as a beam in a particle accelerator. MICE collaboration The researchers have now revealed how to achieve this.
They overcame key challenges, discovering how to increase the density and position of muons in the beam, making them easier to control and collide in particle accelerators.
In particular, the MICE (Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment) collaboration is an international scientific project focused on the development of muon ionization cooling techniques.
Cooling muon beams makes them easier to handle
Muons are heavy particles, but they are very unstable. decay into electrons And the neutrino is born within 2.2 microseconds of its creation.
This makes it difficult to keep them together in an accelerator for long enough to form a concentrated beam and collide them, and because they have a short lifetime, they need to be collected and accelerated quickly before they decay.
In previous work, the authors learned to use materials that reduce the muons’ energy and arrange them into a beam. They also used magnetic lenses to focus the muons, Sustaining the muon It is located in the central area of the beam.
Now, the researchers have studied the shape of the beam and found that cooling a muon beam reduces the space it occupies. Moreover, cooling allows the muons to move in an aligned state. “Ionization cooling allows us to reduce the phase-space volume of the muon beam,” the researchers point out.
They also performed experiments with a small prototype accelerator that demonstrated the formation and cooling of a high-brightness muon beam. “The clear positive results shown in our new analysis give us the confidence to proceed with the development of a larger prototype accelerator that will put this technique into practice.” Said Ken Long, one of the study authors and a MICE scientist.
Advantages of muon accelerators
The MICE Collaboration is made up of hundreds of scientists working together to bring the muon accelerator (a particle accelerator that uses muons) from a theoretical concept to reality.
This is because muon colliders offer several advantages over conventional particle accelerators, such as: “Future muon colliders, if built, could potentially provide a discovery range ten times greater than that of CERN’s Large Hadron Collider, even after significant upgrades.” according to to the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory.
the current, LHCThe circumference of the muon collider is about 17 miles (27 km) and is planned to be expanded to about 56 miles (90 km). The muon collider will enable scientists to perform high-energy collisions in a smaller space at lower cost.
“A muon collider would be more compact, cheaper and would reach similar useful energies to those proposed for the 90kg proton collider in a much smaller space,” the study authors added.
However, there are currently no operational muon accelerators, and while the current research has solved one of the key challenges in making this technology a reality, researchers still have a lot of work to do.
The MICE team’s next goal is to develop an effective cooling system for future muon accelerators.
of study Published in the journal Natural Physics.
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