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Are we able to generate muons outside of a particle accelerator, or does all muography rely on cosmic rays?
by voidUpdate 6mo ago
Are we able to generate muons outside of a particle accelerator, or does all muography rely on cosmic rays?
- pif 6mo agoMuons are not stable, thus you cannot tear them off matter as you'd do with electrons. And they have a mass of 105 MeV each, which means you need a nice particle accelerator to create a few of them. Furthermore, if you want (most of) them to fly in a particular direction, you need to scale that accelerator up.
- scheme271 6mo agoIt's pretty much just cosmic rays. I suppose you can sort of create them by using an accelerator to generate a beam of the appropriate particles that'll hit a target or decay and become a beam of muons outside the accelerator but that's not really all that practical. Incidentally, this is how neutrino beams are generated.
- Someone 6mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muon_tomography: “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. […] Since 2010s researchers are also exploring and attempting to use artificially generated muons—created by conventional accelerators or laser-plasma systems—for muon tomography.” I may overlook something, but skimming the references, I get the impression the latter still is an idea. References are about simulating the machinery, discussing requirements of hypothetical machines, etc.