Article on Muon

What is a Muon?

A muon is a type of subatomic particle.  The name is pronounced “myoo-on,” and

comes from the Greek letter µ, which we spell “mu” and pronounce “myoo.”  

A muon is a type of particle very much like an electron.  In fact, it is exactly the

same as an electron – except heavier.  The mass of a muon is 207 times the

mass of an electron.  You can remember or look up (or take our word for it) that

the mass of a proton, by contrast, is about 1,800 times the mass of an electron. 

So a muon has all the properties of an electron, but is more similar in mass to the

                   big clunkiness (in relative terms) of a proton or other nuclear particle.  
                   A muon, however, is not

made up of any other particles. 

It is not a bag of electrons or of

anything else, but appears to

be its own elementary or

fundamental particle.  It’s just a

heavier version of an ordinary

electron.  If the existence of the

muon seems strange and

unnecessary to you, you are in good company.  The world-famous physicist I. I.

Rabi, when first told of the discovery of the muon, said in response, “Who

ordered that?”

There’s a good reason why the muon is such an unfamiliar particle: 

muons are radioactive, and they decay with a half-life of 1.52 microseconds. 

That’s 1.52 x 10^-6 seconds, or 1.52 millionths of a second.  Not 5,700 years, like

14C, but 1.52 millionths of a second!  Muons don’t stick around long enough for

anything ordinary to be made out of them. [This may be a good time to review a

few units of time we will be using later on.  A microsecond is one millionth of a

second, which can be written as 0.000001s or 10^-6s.  When times get even

shorter than this, we turn to the nanosecond, which is one billionth of a second,

or 10^-9s.  The nanosecond is denoted by “ns.”  We use the Greek letter µ as the

abbreviation for micro, so “microsecond” is denoted by “µs.”  The use of µ as an

abbreviation here is not directly related to the fact that µ also forms the symbol

and the name for the muon particle we are studying.]

A muon decays into an electron and two neutrinos (the neutrinos are very

hard to detect):

µ e+ ν_e + ν_µ       (muon  electron + electron antineutrino + muon neutrino)

How and when did scientists first notice such funny, short-lived particles in

the first place?  The muon was discovered in 1936 by Carl Anderson, a physicist

at Caltech.  By the way, shortly before this, in 1932-33, Anderson had discovered

another unusual particle called the positron.  The positron, which is exactly like

an electron but with positive instead of negative electric charge, is sometimes

called an antielectron and was the first-discovered member of a whole category

of particles known as antimatter.  Carl Anderson won the Nobel Prize in 1936 for

the discovery of antimatter.  In fact, he shared that year’s Nobel Prize with Victor

Hess, the original discoverer of cosmic rays.

Anderson discovered the existence of positrons and muons by very similar

methods.  He studied tracks made by various cosmic ray particles in an

apparatus called a cloud chamber, under the influence of an applied magnetic

field.  If you have taken physics and have studied magnetic forces, you will know

that a charged particle curves its path when it is influenced by a magnetic field. 

The direction of the curve tells whether a particle has positive or negative charge,

and the radius of curvature tells the charge-to-mass ratio or Z/m for the particle. 

The muon was discovered when Anderson found particle tracks just like an

electron but with Z/m 207 times smaller; the positron was discovered when

Anderson found particle tracks just like an electron but curving in the wrong

direction.

The first paper to describe the muon’s radioactive decay was published in

the journal Nature in 1940, by a pair of scientists named Williams and Roberts. 

Very soon after, in 1941, the muon half-life was measured by Rasetti and co-

workers and found to be t_1/2 = 1.5 ± 0.3 µs.  We will be measuring the muon half-

life in our own experiment.  We’ll see if our results match Rasetti’s from 1941!

To make the story just a little bit stranger, fast-forward to 1975.  In 1975

scientists discovered a particle exactly like the electron and the muon… only

heavier.  This extra-heavy electron was called the tau lepton (symbol “τ”,

pronounced t-“ow!”).  The tau decays to a muon, and has a half-life even shorter

than the muon’s.  Observations of tau leptons are still rather rare, but stray

muons turn out to be so common in cosmic rays that many physicists consider

them more of a nuisance than anything else!  That’s fortunate for us, as it gives

us a free, reliable source of muons for the half-life measurement we will perform.