The Case For a Muon Collider Succeeding the LHC Just Got Stronger 53
StartsWithABang writes: If you strike the upper atmosphere with a cosmic ray, you produce a whole host of particles, including muons. Despite having a mean lifetime of just 2.2 microseconds, and the speed of light being 300,000 km/s, those muons can reach the ground! That's a distance of 100 kilometers traveled, despite a non-relativistic estimate of just 660 meters. If we apply that same principle to particle accelerators, we discover an amazing possibility: the ability to create a collider with the cleanliness and precision of electron-positron colliders but the high energies of proton colliders. All we need to do is build a muon collider. A pipe dream and the stuff of science fiction just 20 years ago, recent advances have this on the brink of becoming reality, with a legitimate possibility that a muon-antimuon collider will be the LHC's successor.
Silly Monkeys (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Silly Monkeys (Score:5, Funny)
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More like attorocks but whatever.
And what much difference is there between a speeding bullet and a rock? The way you throw the rock might differ, but a rock is a rock.
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We need a better way to thin the herd. The existing methods haven't worked at slowing down the increase in humans.
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But not very stable.. :))
A muon is like an electron but is type II matter so is unstable.. Could work great in an accelerator.
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I'd say that the fire element represents energy. Heat is the most obvious form of energy so it makes sense to use it as a representation of all energy interactions.
The other 3 elements represent the primary states of matter. Plasma wasn't discovered until much later, so it wasn't included in the list of elements at the time. Although, it could be said that the aether is dark matter, which would bring the total to 6?
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We tried nuclear fission. But the really silly monkeys just started screaming and flinging poo.
Depends on where you live... (Score:2)
Oh, is it so ? *My* electrons are pushed around by water falling down and funny glow-in-the-dark rocks.
Yep, it's all about rocks again...
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Submission Summary = Headache (Score:1)
The byline of the article explains it better:
medium.com, again? (Score:3)
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What is it with the metric ton of medium.com articles appearing recently? Their advertising and media presence team got awake and started mass-submitting stories to slashdot?
StartsWithABang [slashdot.org] submits them all but never comments. That account has submitted nine articles from medium.com this week alone. Funny that.
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I think this is the replacement for Bennett since we voted his ass to the curb.
At least his summaries are shorter than Bennett's.
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Well at least the medium articles tend to be readable (ignoring the useless images).
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metric ton (Score:2)
"What is it with the metric ton of medium.com articles"
IMO the "metric ton" should be called a MegaGram (it is after all one thousand KiloGrams)
and of course the article should be on light.com rather than medium.com
Oh, fuck this asshole and his exclamation points. (Score:1)
Seriously, you can't find a physics blog written by an adult?
Good idea because ... (Score:5, Funny)
P.S. Where is the JOKE tag when you need one?
Algorithmic Design... (Score:1)
...but is it Heuristically Programmed?
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Weird. I was reading one thread, went to post, realised I wasn't logged in, logged in, and somehow my comment got attached to a completely different article.
Please ignore.
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Ok. I'm interested. Which article was it?
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Really? Soooo.... after you get sick, you will happily reject the results of all that money spent on health research over the years? It was someone else's money, you have no right to it given the pittance you paid in taxes.
Come to think of it, all that money pissed off on quantum physics over the years that allowed you to type your silly thought was useless as well, take it back.
And all that money the Swiss patent office pissed off on Einstein when he was supposed to be working instead of working out a theo
Very old news (Score:5, Insightful)
The supposed 'advance' was someone asking a question on the Internet. The answer was special relativity which we've had for 110 years.
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In other words, clickbait that is mildly interesting but not at all new or useful. Exactly like every other StartsWithABang post.
Estimate of 660 meters (Score:4, Informative)
Old news (Score:5, Informative)
IAAAP (I am an accelerator physicist), and this is pretty old news. The US muon collider program is actually on its way out. Last year's Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel (P5) advised the DOE to defund the muon collider project, redirecting funds toward the International Linear Collider (ILC)-- a 250GeV e+/e- precision Higgs factory-- and other projects:
http://science.energy.gov/~/media/hep/hepap/pdf/May%202014/FINAL_P5_Report_Interactive_060214.pdf
The DOE has followed P5's review, and Fermilab's muon collider project is winding down.
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According to this article it's easier to put energy in particles with substantial mass. They don't seem to leak as much.
So how are they gonna
Re:Old news (Score:5, Informative)
According to this article it's easier to put energy in particles with substantial mass. They don't seem to leak as much.
So how are they gonna accomplish these 2-3 x higher energies in the ILC over the LEP ? More massive electric fields ?
It's all in the name. ILC = "International Linear Collider", i.e., two linacs pointed at each other. Synchrotron radiation only bites you if you're accelerating tangentially to the direction of motion. There's very little synchrotron radiation in a linear accelerator. LEP was a circular collider (proceeding the LHC, and occupying the same tunnel the LHC now uses), hence the synchrotron radiation problem.
The trouble with linacs is they're somewhat wasteful. Each bunch only gets one crossing with the opposing beam, so you're constantly accelerating new bunches. At LEP you got something around 100 million chances for a bunch to interact with the opposing beam (assuming ~1hr fills)-- and that's assuming only one collision point.
So, it's six to one, half-dozen to the other. Either you expend all your energy accelerating new bunches constantly, or you expend all your energy replacing what's lost to synchrotron radiation.
--IAAAP
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The problem with high-mass particles is they lose energy when accelerating - and in the physics sense, which includes changing direction, as when traveling around a circular path. Linear accelerators, I assume, do not have such a problem: They don't spin their particles in circular paths. That's my guess anyway, I'm not a physicist.
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what price science? (Score:2)
we need to find a way to talk about the price of science projects. there are many examples: the top of top500, LHC, Iter, etc. we don't seem to discuss them rationally: to estimate the practical payoff in order to evaluate the cost of building them.
Moon Collider??! (Score:2)
Oh.. moun collider. This article just got BOOOORRRING.