Earlier this year, FindLight, a marketplace for products specialized in photonics, reported that a study led by Penn State University had shed light on a little-known mystery outside research laboratories.
For years, physicists thought the muon—a particle similar to an electron but 200 times heavier—might be revealing a hidden fifth force of nature.
Using advanced lattice simulations and supercomputers, researchers found that the muon’s magnetic behavior matches the predictions of the Standard Model with remarkable precision.
Muon imaging is useful for examining the interiors of nuclear reactors, volcanoes, tsunamis, and the Great Pyramid, and is able to penetrate much further than X-rays through materials as dense as 30-meter-thick concrete walls.
However, as the National Nuclear Security Administration pointed out, the method can be extremely slow since the images need exposure times of about a month.
In 2023, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory announced that it was entering into partnerships with industry and academic researchers in order to produce these particles.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's Muons for Science and Security program provided funding for the project, which involves high-energy particle physics, plasma physics, advanced numerical simulations, high-performance computing, systems, and systems engineering.
The project also included collaboration with the University of Maryland and Lockheed Martin.
This week, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) announced that, in cooperation with Ideon Technologies, it obtained funding from the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy as part of the Reliable Ore Characterization with Keystone Sensing (ROCKS) initiative.
Ideon Technologies is a leading company in the fields of muon tomography and advanced data fusion for use in mineral exploration and mining, including having proprietary muon detector arrays, physics simulations, and geological software.
The software converts the raw data into 3D mass-density visualizations, allowing geologists to "see" mineral deposits and structural anomalies at a meter-scale resolution.
The three-year program aims to establish a reliable domestic supply of critical minerals—minerals that are essential for energy, industry and national security—by means of highly accurate imaging deep beneath the Earth's surface, a level of precision that conventional sensing techniques are unable to achieve.
Douglas Schouten, Ideon's co-founder and chief technology officer, stresses that there is a need for faster and better methods if critical minerals are to be understood and developed for the resources society urgently requires.
Because of this project, physics at a level higher than that of the world's largest particle accelerators will be able to take images of millions of cubic feet of rock in just a few hours rather than taking several months.
By working with research organizations such as Berkeley Lab, Ideon is taking this cutting-edge capability out of the laboratory and combining it with advanced sensing and subatomic particles so that it can provide real benefits to the industries that society relies on.
The project will create a highly penetrating and portable muon source and will assist the United States in keeping its leadership in critical mineral resources which are important for both energy and the economy by means of the technologies developed through pioneering research and development work.
There is a need for faster and better methods if critical minerals are to be developed for the resources society urgently requires.
Because of its vast experience in using detectors at high-energy particle colliders, the Physics Division at Berkeley Lab will supply the muon instrumentation and the particle-tracking diagnostics needed to optimize the muon beam.
This project provides a exciting chance of converting decades of research into technology which addresses a major national requirement by providing reliable systems for producing the high-energy muons needed for practical subsurface imaging.
This technology's potential goes well beyond mining; it might be used to detect underground voids, gaps, and caves, and would therefore offer important benefits to civil engineering and industrial safety, with consequences for national security and critical infrastructure.
For many years Ideon Technologies has, in collaboration with the mining industry, made use of "passive" muons—muons which are produced when cosmic rays collide with atmospheric particles—in order to map up ore deposits and find out about the Earth's subsurface.
Berkeley Lab has already demonstrated its ability to accelerate an electron beam with an energy of 10 giga-electron-volts in a single stage over a distance of 30 centimeters.
The aim of the project is now to connect two stages of laser plasma accelerator, each having an energy of about 6 giga-electron volts, in order to obtain an acceleration of more than 12 giga-electron volts.
Achieving success in this multi-stage proof of concept and reducing the associated risks will prove the technical feasibility of attaining the 30-gigaelectronvolt systems needed to penetrate 50 meters of rock and the 100-gigaelectronvolt systems capable of sensing through 150 meters.