![]() Cosmic muons have played a role in special projects, such as when scientists used them to image interior chambers of the great pyramids in Egypt. Harnessing these muons for imaging is tedious and not very practical. Cosmic ray interactions in the upper atmosphere naturally generate muons as they descend to Earth in created particle showers. Currently, two primary sources for muons exist. Producing muons, however, is a challenge, because it requires a very high-energy, giga-electronvolt (GeV) particle source. At high energy, muons can travel easily through dozens to hundreds of meters of water, solid rock, or soil. Muons are similar to electrons but about 200 times heavier. For such imaging capabilities, a more powerful particle is needed.ĭARPA's Muons for Science and Security program (MuS2 - pronounced Mew-S-2) aims to create a compact source of deeply penetrating subatomic particles known as muons. But none of these sources can image through concrete walls several meters thick, map the core of a volcano from the outside, or peer deep underground to locate chambers and tunnels. As the four-year program progresses, officials anticipate it’ll be divided into two equal phases: one focused on experimentation, modeling and scaling studies in support of the production of 10 GeV muons and a second focused on scalable accelerator design generation for at least 100 GeV, the release states.The Defense Department and other federal agencies have sought advanced sources that generate gamma rays, X-rays, neutrons, protons, and electrons to enable a variety of scientific, commercial, and defense applications - from medical diagnostics, to scans of cargo containers for dangerous materials, to non-destructive testing of aircraft and their parts to see internal defects. The SAM.gov notice indicated that a BAA could be released as soon as this month. Registration will close July 29 or when all the available slots are filled. 5, would follow the release of an anticipated broad agency announcement, according to the SAM.gov notice. “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,” Wrobel added. Given those requirements, large physics research facilities are the primary source of terrestrially developed muons, per the release. Only two main avenues for producing or harnessing muons currently exist, according to DARPA, and adding to those options is challenging because of the need for a high-energy, giga-electronvolt (GeV) particle source. “MuS2 will lay the groundwork needed to examine the feasibility of developing compact and transportable muon sources,” Mark Wrobel, MuS2 program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, said in the release. Officials hope to see between 1 million and 100 million muons created through the undertaking, a notice posted to SAM.gov late last week shows. The program aims to develop a new source of muons - subatomic particles similar to electrons that “can travel easily through dozens to hundreds of meters of water, solid rock, or soil” at high energy, according to DARPA’s release. The examples were included in a recent agency press release announcing a forthcoming proposers day, intended to get officials from academia, government and industry familiar with the Muons for Science and Security effort, called MuS2. ![]() ![]() The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is looking to kick-start a program to generate enhanced imaging capabilities that could scan entire buildings from the outside or map underground tunnels beneath Earth’s surface. ![]()
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