• Question: What is one of the perks of firing muons?

    Asked by anon-185086 to Adam on 5 Nov 2018.
    • Photo: Adam Berlie

      Adam Berlie answered on 5 Nov 2018:


      Muons are implanted in materials. The basiaclly behave like tiny bar magents inside materials and so you are sensitive to all different types of magentism and magnetic behaviour and this is wide ranging. Where muons come into thier own is that we work in true zero-field enviorments, where we have to screen out even the Earth’s magnetic field because this will give us signals. This is pretty unqiue and not many techniques can actually do this! Muons decay in 2.2 microseconds (into a positron and neutrino in the case of positive muons) and so we can also study physical phenomena that happens on this time scale – 1 microsecond is 0.000001 seconds so quite fast – but not that fast compared to a lot of other phenomena!

Comments