Transatlantic collaboration on precision experiments with muons to be strengthened / Kick-off meeting on January 25, 2002
25.01.2022
The EU is funding the aMUSE project with 1.9 million euros as part of its H2020 MSCA-RISE program. 100,000 euros of this will go to Mainz to the research group of Prof. Dr. Martin Fertl at the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence. The aMUSE project finances travel activities of the participating institutions to Fermilab near Chicago. There, there is one of the most intense muon beams in the world, which is used for the ongoing muon g-2 experiment. The primary proton beam will later be used for the Mu2e experiment, which is currently under construction. Both experiments are designed to search for new physics beyond the Standard Model. At the beginning of the year, aMUSE was officially launched - the kick-off meeting takes place on January 25.
aMUSE stands for "Advanced Muon Campus in US and Europe Contribution" and was selected from 408 proposals submitted to the European Commission. The project, similar to its predecessor MUSE, will coordinate the activities of about 80 researchers from 12 European research institutes and industry involved in the search for new physics using muons and in the development of a new generation of muon accelerators at top U.S. research centers such as Fermilab, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center.
The muon - the heavy relative of the electron is a popular object of study in particle physics. It is popular because its properties can be measured and calculated with extreme precision. If discrepancies occur between theory and experiment, this is a strong indication of new physics. The aMUSE project includes two experiments at the Fermilab Muon Campus: muon g-2 and Mu2e. The muon g-2 experiment has been taking data since 2016 and is designed to improve the accuracy in measuring the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon by a factor of four. Mu2e is looking for the decay of a muon into two electrons, which is extremely unlikely according to the Standard Model and has not been observed before. The goal of the Mu2e experiment is to improve the accuracy of the search for this decay by four orders of magnitude.
First results of the muon g-2 experiment caused a big sensation in 2021: "With our new experimental value, which is more accurate than any value before, the evidence for new physics beyond this Standard Model and thus for the existence of previously unknown particles or forces is growing stronger," Prof. Dr. Martin Fertl, professor at the Mainz Cluster of Excellence PRISMA+, is pleased to announce. "Setting up such an experiment and making it work is only possible in a large collaboration that brings together a wide variety of special expertise. aMUSE is a very important project to further strengthen this exchange by funding trips to the U.S. and thus to keep pushing the search for new physics using muons in a large worldwide research network."
Overall, aMUSE represents a valuable extension of activities already envisioned for the Fermilab Muon Campus - such as a research and development program for innovative detectors to upgrade Mu2e, or the development of a new beamline to study further muon decays. aMUSE will also be the starting point for a European-American network for the development of novel techniques for muon beam production.