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In this issue:
Theorists Reveal Path to True Muonium
Colloquium Today: Dark Matter Candidates and Signals
New "Brown Bag" Series on Finance Planning
Monday - June 1, 2009 |
Theorists Reveal Path to True MuoniumTrue muonium, a long-theorized but never-seen atom, might be observed in future experiments, thanks to recent theoretical work by researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Arizona State University. True muonium was first theorized more than 50 years ago, but until now no one had uncovered an unambiguous method by which it could be created and observed. "We don't usually work in this area, but one day we were idly talking about how experimentalists could create exotic states of matter," said SLAC theorist Stanley Brodsky, who worked with Arizona State's Richard Lebed on the result. "As our conversation progressed, we realized 'Gee… we just figured out how to make true muonium.'" True muonium is made of a muon and an anti-muon, and is distinguished from what's also been called "muonium"—an atom made of an electron and an anti-muon. Both muons and anti-muons are created frequently in nature when energetic particles from space strike the earth's atmosphere. Yet both have a fleeting existence, and their combination, true muonium, decays naturally into other particles in a few trillionths of a second. This makes observation of the exotic atom quite difficult. In a paper published this week in Physical Review Letters, Brodsky and Lebed describe two methods by which electron–positron accelerators could detect the signature of true muonium's formation and decay. Read more... Colloquium Today:
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