As its Tevatron collider goes dark, Fermilab ponders a muon-rich future

[n2doc]

By John Timmer | Published about 17 hours ago



Since the 1980s, the US government's Chicago-area Fermilab has been at the forefront of high-energy physics. That's in large part thanks to the Tevatron, the machine that first reached the energies needed to discover the last quark in the Standard Model. But the Tevatron has come to the end of its run; at 2pm on Friday, it will be shut down for the last time (an event that will be webcast).

The move will shift physicists' focus across the Atlantic, to the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN. The LHC is likely to enjoy a long run at the top of particle physics, but in time, it too will be superseded. What might come next? If Fermilab scientists have their way, particle physics could migrate from hadrons to muons. But getting there will take time, research, and the serious application of time-dilating relativity.

A series of bad options

The cancellation of the American Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) in the 1990s gave particle physics a hangover. It took years for the next big accelerator (the LHC) to be built, and even when it operates at its designed power, it won't reach the energies once planned for the SSC. The LHC is also a fundamentally different project, constructed in tunnels built for an earlier collider and requiring financial input from just about every country with a significant physics program. These harsh realities leave just about everyone who thinks about it wondering whether anything more powerful than the LHC will ever get built. It has also forced them to ponder exotic ways to get particles up to high energies using approaches that are fundamentally different from anything we've tried before.

During Ars' visit to Fermilab earlier this year, however, we found out that at least some researchers have pondered using the traditional approach to accelerating particles—but relying on exotic particles to produce energies that rival those of the LHC in a much smaller space. The muon is a heavier, less stable version of the electron, and it's produced in many of the collisions that occur in particle colliders like the LHC and Tevatron. With a half life of just a few microseconds, it wouldn't seem to be an obvious candidate for accelerating. But, thanks to some of the consequences of relativity, it might just fit the bill.


more

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/09/as-its-tevatron-collider-goes-dark-fermilab-ponders-a-muon-rich-future.ars