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Muon Collider in the News

Half a universe once lost now found
… Of course, there is not just the cosmological standard model (lambdaCDM) that these satisfy in science today. There is also the remarkably resilient Standard Model of particle physics. A report this week from the US National Academies recommends the US begins building the world’s next particle collider to follow the work of the LHC (and FCC) at Cern. It should, as University of Tennessee at Knoxville’s Tova Holmes tells us, collide not ordinary, stable, easy to manipulate particles like protons and electrons, but muons.
Physicists’ hopes for an exotic muon collider get a boost
To regain the lead in particle physics, the United States should build an entirely new type of “atom smasher” by the middle of the century, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) say in a report released yesterday. In recent years, physicists have dreamed of building a collider that would smash muons, which are heavier, unstable cousins of electrons. Although the technical hurdles are high, a muon collider could in principle reach unprecedented energies and search for new particles and phenomena at a much lower cost than more conventional accelerators.
Nature: Why build a muon collider: a three minute guide
How do you solve a problem like dark matter? Or explain why the Universe is built the way it is? For physicists, there’s been one answer that has worked for nearly one hundred years - take two particles and smash them together as hard as you can. But the current generation of massive colliders like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, haven’t produced the flood of new particles some scientists were expecting. So attention is turning to a new type of experiment, using a particle that has never been collided before; muons.
Nature: Physicists tame fundamental muon particles into highly controlled beam for first time
For the first time, researchers have accelerated muons — the heavier, unstable cousins of electrons — into a tightly controlled beam, bringing the vision of a muon collider a step closer to reality.
Symmetry: This is Our Muon Shot
In December, the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, called P5, released its recommendations for the future of the field, based on the input from the Snowmass process. … “At the end of the path is an unparalleled global facility on US soil,” the report reads. “This is our Muon Shot.”
Science: 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.
CERN Courier: Shooting for a Muon Collider
The physics landscape has changed. We have not seen signs of new particles above the Higgs-boson mass. Typical limits are now well above 1 TeV based on LHC data, which means we need to look for the new physics that we anticipate at higher energies. The consensus during the recent US Snowmass process was that we should aim for 10 TeV in the centre-of-mass. A muon collider has the feature that its expected wall-plug power scales very favourably as you go to the multi-TeV scale.
Nature: US particle physicists want to build a muon collider — Europe should pitch in
A feasibility study for a muon smasher in the United States could be an affordable way to maintain particle physics unity.
New York Times: Particle Physicists Offer a Road Map for the Next Decade
A “muon shot” aims to study the basic forces of the cosmos. But meager federal budgets could limit its ambitions. Particle physicists should begin laying the groundwork for a revolutionary particle collider that could be built on American soil, a committee of scientists wrote in a draft report on the future of particle physics released on Thursday.
Scientific American: Particle Physicists Dream of a Muon Collider
Particle physicists are unlikely evangelists, but in papers, at conferences and with T-shirts, stickers and memes, many of them are spreading the good word of a muon collider—a next-generation machine that would smash together muons, the massive cousins of electrons. In a 2021 manifesto, “The Muon Smasher’s Guide,” the particle partisans laid out their case.