The U.S. military's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced the Muons for Science & Security (MuS2) program on Friday, which seeks"to create a compact source of deeply penetrating subatomic particles known as muons" that can "travel easily through dozens to hundreds of meters of water, solid rock, or soil."
"Our goal is to develop a new, terrestrial muon source that doesn't require large accelerators and allows us to create directional beams of muons at relevant energies, from 10s to 100s of GeVs – to either image or characterize materials," said Mark Wrobel, DARPA's Defense Sciences Office MuS2 program manager.
"Enabling this program is high-peak-power laser technology that has been steadily advancing and can potentially create the conditions for muon production in a compact form factor. MuS2 will lay the ground work needed to examine the feasibility of developing compact and transportable muon sources."
DARPA's statement said muons are "particularly advantageous for locating voids in solid structures."
If the program and any "follow-on" efforts are successful, other potential applications of the technology include:
- "whole buildings could be scanned from the outside to characterize internal structures and detect the presence of threat materials such as special nuclear materials"
- "rapidly mapping the location of underground tunnels and chambers hundreds of meters below the Earth's surface"
"MuS2 is a four-year program divided into two phases," DARPA said in a statement. "During the 24-month first phase, teams will conduct initial modeling and scaling studies and use experiments to validate models as well as attempt to produce 10 GeV muons. In the second 24-month phase, teams will aim to develop scalable accelerator designs for 100 GeV or greater and produce relevant numbers of muons for practical applications."
The research will be divided into three areas: experimentation, simulation, and "laser driver and system studies."
"To address these diverse research areas, we anticipate building integrated teams composed of academia, national laboratories, and defense industries," Wrobel said.
How the military will use this tech in coming years remains to be seen. Stay tuned!
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