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Dense short muon source based on laser-ion accelerators

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Abstract

Muons have broad applications in fundamental science such as material science, chemistry, biology, and nuclear physics, which are produced mainly through the proton-nucleon reactions driven by RF-based accelerators in laboratories. However, the cost of improving the muon beam quality on conventional accelerators is increasingly unaffordable. We propose a novel scheme for obtaining an unprecedentedly dense and short muon source by combining the laser-ion accelerator and a conventional beam-converter. With full three-dimensional particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations and Geant4 simulations, it is shown that a mm-scale, several-nanoseconds-duration surface muon source with a yield of \(\sim 10^6/\textrm{shot}\), and a mm-scale, tens-picoseconds-duration flying pion beam with a yield of \(\sim 10^9/\textrm{shot}\) can be achieved via our scheme. These unique properties make the muon beams promising to improve the spatial resolution of muon spin rotation, relaxation, and resonance (\(\upmu SR\)) or single crystals experiments in small samples and the temporal resolution of muon imaging radiography and tomography, together with the sensitivity to rare muon decay investigation. With the increase of laser repetition rate, the laser-driven muon source proposed via our scheme may also be applied for neutrino generation and fusion catalysis.

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Data Availability

This manuscript has no associated data or the data will not be deposited. [Authors’ comment: The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.]

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R &D Program of China (Grant No. 2018YFA0404802), National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 11875319 and 12135009), The Science and Technology Innovation Program of Hunan Province (Grant No. 2020RC4020), The Hunan Provincial Innovation Foundation for Postgraduate (Grant Nos. CX20210007 and CX20210062).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Physics, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, 410073, People’s Republic of China

    Rong Sha, Jun-Hao Cheng, Dong-Ao Li, Jie Zhao, Yan-Ting Hu, Dong-Ze Zhang, Yan-Bo Wu & Tong-Pu Yu

  2. School of Science, Shenzhen Campus of Sun Yat-sen University, Shenzhen, 518107, People’s Republic of China

    Yong-Sheng Huang

  3. Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, People’s Republic of China

    Yong-Sheng Huang

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  1. Rong Sha
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Correspondence to Tong-Pu Yu.

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Communicated by Jose Benlliure.

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Sha, R., Cheng, JH., Li, DA. et al. Dense short muon source based on laser-ion accelerators. Eur. Phys. J. A 58, 249 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1140/epja/s10050-022-00900-w

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