The dream machine (Science 28 Mar 2024)
An accelerator known as a muon collider could revolutionize particle physics—if it can be built
The dream machine
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), enabling the U.S. to reclaim the lead in the continuing competition for the highest energy collider. Most important, younger physicists say, it might be built sooner than a more conventional competitor, perhaps in as few as 25 years. “If you want you can add 10 years to that, that’s still a lot better than when I’m dead,” Holmes says.
There’s just one catch: Nobody knows whether a muon collider can actually be built. That’s because unlike the proton or the electron, the muon isn’t eternal, but decays in just a fraction of a second. “The challenge, if you want to capture it in one word, is that the muon is unstable,” says Sergo Jindariani, a particle physicist at Fermilab. “So every stage of acceleration has to be incredibly fast.” From generating the muons, to gathering them into compact beams, to detecting the particles produced in their collisions, the machine presents novel technological challenges.
