How do you make a muon?

We can produce muons by taking a narrow, high-intensity beam of protons and running it into a target made of a metal, such as titanium. This produces a beam of another fundamental particle called the pion. Pions form a beam which fans out.

How do you make a muon beam?

Scientists create large numbers of muons by steering an intense proton beam into a target made of a dense liquid such as mercury. A set of magnets gets the resulting muons moving in the right direction. The challenge is to corral the muons into dense beams.

Where do you find muon?

Muons are generated in the Earth’s upper atmosphere by cosmic rays (high energy protons) colliding with atomic nuclei of molecules in the air. Muons can also be produced in a two-step process at large research facilities.

How small is a muon?

Colloquially, it could be called “helium 4.1”, since the mass of the muon is slightly greater than 0.1 amu.

How do you identify a muon?

Because muons can penetrate several metres of iron without interacting, unlike most particles they are not stopped by any of CMS’s calorimeters. Therefore, chambers to detect muons are placed at the very edge of the experiment where they are the only particles likely to register a signal.

What is the muon system?

Muon Systems offers a muon tomography service oriented to large industrial and natural structures using in-home developed detectors, algorithms, and analysis tools. The technique utilizes cosmic muon radiation present naturally in the environment, being its application innocuous, safe, and clean.

What is the muon used for?

Muons have applications across a very broad range of areas. We can use them for studying magnetism, superconductivity, diffusion and charge transport, chemical reactions and molecular dynamics. In many of these areas, they give us complementary information to other techniques such as neutron scattering.

What makes up a muon?

Muons have the same negative charge as electrons but 200 times the mass. They are made when high-energy particles called cosmic rays slam into atoms in Earth’s atmosphere. Travelling at close to the speed of light, muons shower Earth from all angles.