Remix.run Logo
voidUpdate 4 hours ago

Are we able to generate muons outside of a particle accelerator, or does all muography rely on cosmic rays?

scheme271 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It'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 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

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.

pif 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Muons 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.