A muon collider could revolutionize particle physics —if it can be built

Young people supposedly enjoy the luxury of time, but perhaps not if they’re particle physicists. For decades, physicists have peered into the universe’s inner workings by smashing subatomic particles together at ever higher energies. But the next highest energy collider may not be built for 50 years. And Tova Holmes, 34 and a particle physicist at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, worries her career could slip away before she ever sees such a machine. “I will be definitely not still working, possibly not alive,” Holmes says. That’s one reason she and dozens of her contemporaries are pushing to develop an exotic new collider. The current highest energy atom smasher, the 27-kilometer-long Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at the European particle physics laboratory, CERN, fires protons into protons. In 2012 it discovered a long-sought particle called the Higgs boson in the field’s greatest triumph. CERN is now hoping to build a much bigger, higher energy proton collider , nearly 100 kilometers around—but not until 2070 or 2080. So Holmes and others want to explore an alternative: a collider that would smash energetic muons, heavier cousins of electrons, into equally energetic antimuons. A muon collider could be much smaller and cheaper than a functionally equivalent proton collider, advocates say. It could fit on the 2750-hectare campus of the United States’s dedicated particle physics lab, Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab),...
Source: ScienceNOW - Category: Science Source Type: news