Muon Colliders: Opening New Horizons for Particle Physics

TL;DR

Muon colliders could revolutionize particle physics by enabling higher energy experiments beyond the LHC, leveraging muons' properties despite their rapid decay, with recent technological advances making this feasible.

Contribution

This paper highlights the potential of muon colliders as the next-generation energy frontier machine and discusses recent technological progress enabling their development.

Findings

Muon colliders can reach higher energies than current colliders.

Recent tech developments address muon decay challenges.

International collaborations are forming to realize muon colliders.

Abstract

Particle colliders have arguably been the most important instruments for particle physics over the past 50 years. As they became more powerful, they were used to push the frontier of our knowledge into previously uncharted territory. The LHC, the highest energy collider to date, at which the Higgs boson was discovered, is a prime example. To continue along the road into the Terra Promissa beyond the Standard Model requires colliders with energy reach even greater than that of the LHC. Beams of muons offer enormous potential for the exploration of the energy frontier. Since the muon is a fundamental particle, its full energy is available in collisions in contrast to protons which are composed of quarks and gluons. However, muon beams decay rapidly, which presents a special challenge for a collider. Recent research indicates that the technologies required to overcome this challenge are within our grasp and may offer a cost-effective and energy-efficient option to continue our explorations. A new international collaboration is forming to bring together the diverse expertise and complementary capabilities from around the world to realize the muon collider as the next-generation energy-frontier discovery machine.