Lasers made muon beams, no massive accelerator needed
The advance hints at the possibility of portable muon-making devices that could help peer through solid materials for hidden contraband.
Sadly, Nature has chosen to cripple access to the source article on this story - so not linking to it.
Uh the paper is linked in the article and I had no issue accessing it https://journals.aps.org/prab/pdf/10.1103/kxjr-h7zs
Wow, super cool! So I take it they're not good for medical imaging? Either go right through too easily to cast a shadow or harmful in some way? The truck scanner stuff is cool though, albeit a bit surveillancey. I'm sure archaeologists would love to have portable muon tomography though! I wonder what else this will end up being used for... Seems like there's surely lots of possibilities left.
If we have a way of making muons, does that mean muon-catalyzed fusion is feasible?
Great question. Talking this very point out right now after finding this article.
Maybe this could help get us closer to viable muon catalyzed fusion.
Getting closer to Black Mesa technology :3
Anything that would be useful for smaller laboratories is a good thing.
Uhm, didn’t physicist David Keith of Harvard, better know for his work on carbon capture, do something like this in the early 1990s in building the early atom interferometers?
He didn’t pursue the development as the applications were military at that time but my recollection was that he created a lab bench sized generator.
I read that as "beans" at first and was very confused