Japan Announces Breakthrough in Muon

TapTechNews May 21 news, the Japan J-PARC Research Center and the Japan High Energy Accelerator Research Organization jointly released a communiqué, announcing the completion of the industry's first operation of cooling and accelerating muons, taking a big step towards realizing the world's first muon (muon) accelerator.

According to the introduction, the research team at the J-PARC Center slowed a positively charged positive muon to a state almost at a standstill (0.002% of the speed of light), and unified the direction and speed of the positive muon (this process is called cooling), and then applied a high-frequency electric field to accelerate the positive muon, and finally accelerated the positive muon to 4% of the speed of light to form a highly directional positive muon beam with the same direction and speed. Specific details will be revealed at the press conference on June 5.

TapTechNews inquiry learned that the muon is a fundamental particle with a single unit of negative charge and has extremely strong penetration ability, which can be used for non-contact and non-destructive imaging inside large target objects. Naturally existing muons come from high-energy cosmic rays, and a large number of muons can be generated with the help of a proton accelerator.

In the communiqué, it is mentioned that the acceleration of muons is very difficult technically and there has been no successful precedent so far. This research has for the first time confirmed that muons can be cooled and accelerated.

It is worth noting that there is also no muon accelerator among various accelerators in the world. The life span of muons is only about 2 microseconds, and if they are not accelerated quickly, they will decay soon.

In addition, the mass of muons is about 200 times that of electrons and must be multi-stage accelerated. The research team plans to continuously improve the technology and finally achieve accelerating it to 94% of the speed of light.