Daniel and Kelly’s Extraordinary Universe - Can we see inside things using muons?

Episode Date: February 8, 2024

Daniel and Jorge talk about the weirdness of muons and how they can let us see inside things.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA. terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order Criminal Justice System

on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate.

Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Do we really need another podcast with a condescending finance brof trying to tell us how to spend our own money? No, thank you. Instead, check out Brown Ambition. Each week, I, your host, Mandy Money, gives you real talk, real advice with a heavy dose of I-feel uses, like on Fridays when I take your questions for the BAQA. Whether you're trying to invest for your future, navigate a toxic workplace, I got you. Listen to Brown Ambition on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, Daniel, is particle physics actually useful for anything?

I mean, it's good for like understanding the universe, for sure. Yeah, but what can I use particles for? Can I use a charm quark? You charm my way into a better life? I think you're plenty charming already without any charm quarks, but we might be able to like use muons to help us get to the moon. What? Just because they start with an M?

Because they're one letter off from moon and muon? I'm just reaching here, man. Can you use the mules to feed cows, you know, or grow more corn? More mues, less corn. I mean, nothing is certain in science, but that's probably a no. Why not? Don't cows eat mouons? Don't they eat mouons?

I think muons actually cause cows to mutate and make new kinds of cows. Oh, well, maybe we'll get a taste your cow out of it, in which case particles would be. Be useful. Better steaks through physics. That's right. Better particle burgers. Hi, I'm Jorge. I'm a cartoonist and the author of Oliver's Great Big Universe. Hi, I'm Daniel. I'm a particle physicist and a professor at UC Irvine, and I like believing that physics raises the steaks. The steaks like the cow steaks. Yeah, we've got to raise some steaks. Or the burgers, maybe. I mean, you're always talking about setting the steaks and stories, right? Yeah, that's always

important. But usually it's the emotional steaks, not the raw or well-done kind. Well, I like to get my steaks at the restaurant called Mcuffins. Do you like them rare or well-done? I rarely eat steaks, actually, is the truth. He eats steaks rarely, or rarely eat steaks? Yeah, I almost never eat steaks. My son is a big fan of protein, but he prefers chicken and turkey. He's a poultry man. Oh, I see.

He likes it lean. He likes it with wings. He's nice to stay lean and flighty as well. But anyways, welcome to our podcast, Daniel and Jorge, Explain the Universe, a production of our Heart Radio. In which we help your brain to take flight and trim all the fat from your understanding of the universe. We think it's possible to zoom out there with our minds and understand everything that happens in the universe from the tiniest little particles to the biggest most massive black holes.

And our goal is to break it all down and explain it to you. That's right. We try to prevent your brain from having a cow thinking about the amazing and vast universe we live in with all the complicated physics and mechanics that are happening. We try to boil it all down to make it digestible and lean. We trim all the fat out of science communication. while trying to keep it still plenty juicing. And it's all 100% organic, right? We use no chemicals in this podcast.

I mean, I guess everything's a chemical, so yeah. I mean, I do use growth hormones to inflate my intelligence a little bit. But one of the reasons we're talking about such practical matters is because one of the criticisms of particle physics is that it can be kind of abstract. Like, are the questions of particle physics really useful to you on an everyday basis, or is it more of a philosophical search for understanding of the nature of the universe? Yeah, you got to kind of wonder what is smashing all those particles together, spending billions of dollars, what is that all useful for? How is it helping humanity?

Move forward and maybe eat better as well. And of course, there are lots of indirect benefits. Just understanding the nature of the universe is its own prize and is priceless. But every dollar we invest in basic research comes back to us in terms of technological advancements and economic output and education and employment. So it's definitely a worthy way to spend money, I say, with absolutely no conflict of interest whatsoever. I was going to say it definitely means employment for certain people, like physicists, perhaps. It certainly does, but it benefits everybody because investment in basic research always leads to revolutions and our understanding and in technology and, and, and, you know, And all sorts of stuff.

Yeah, I guess without physics, there wouldn't be this podcast, which sort of employs us, right? And improves the lives of everybody on Earth. I guess if physics wasn't around, we'd have to talk about something else or explain the universe using other things. Absolutely. But sometimes particle physics can be more directly useful. Things we learn about weird particles, exotic matter, can actually be put to use to help us solve everyday earthly mysteries. And it might actually also help us have x-ray vision in a way. So today on the podcast, we'll be tackling the question.

Can we use mouons to see inside of things? What kinds of things are we talking about, Daniel? All kinds of things. Yes, absolutely. Escape rooms, people's pockets, safes in banks, yeah. Oh, boy, what's inside the burgers at McDonald's, perhaps? Nobody wants to know that for real men. That's not why you go to McDonald's.

I don't think we'll get grand funding for that question. No, that's a situation where knowledge can ruin something. Yeah, yeah. But it is an interesting question. Whether we can use meons to see inside of things. You mean, is this sort of like using muons as x-rays, kind of? Yeah, it's a similar idea. Can we use penetrating radiation to reveal something that is hidden from us?

Can we look inside something without opening it up? Can we just use x-rays? I thought that was a hard. right invented. We can use x-rays, but x-rays also have their limits. And so muons might open up the possibility to see inside things that are otherwise still close to us, even with x-rays. Interesting.

All right, we'll dig into it. But first, as usual, we were wondering how many people out there had thought about using muons to see inside of things and how we might be able to do that. Thanks very much to everybody who plays the game for this section of the podcast. We love hearing your voice. And if you would like to participate, it's very easy. It all happens over email. just write to me to questions at danielandhorpe.com.

So think about it for a second. Do you think we can use mons to see inside of things? Here's what people had to say. No idea. Absolutely. But I know that there is some talk of making a mouons collider or something like that. I read about that in some news reports. So I'm going to say, yeah, why not? You know, if you can accelerate them enough and they don't dissipate energy like electrons,

there should be a way to create collisions. I'm going to say yes. I listened to your whole podcast about muons, but I've completely forgotten what they are. So I am going to take a guess and say, yes, you can use mons to see inside something. I would imagine using muons to look inside things would be what the same principle is using an electron microscope.

But I suspect muons are smaller than electrons. So for them to bounce off something and give an image, they have to be bouncing off very small subatomic particles. I don't know what a muon is, so I don't know. All right. I imagine a lot of people are like that person who said, they don't know what a muon is. They don't know.

But it sounds like a reasonable question. A lot of people seem pretty optimistic about this. Yeah, if a muon is some new kind of particle, maybe it's got some new kind of powers or abilities or properties that lets you do new kinds of stuff. I guess that's the optimism. All right. Well, let's put a stake through this question and we started the basics.

Daniel, what is exactly a muon? A lot of people seem to have heard us talk about it, but maybe forgotten what it is. A muon can best be understood is like a heavier version, a more massive version of the electron. It's very, very similar to the electron. It has a lot of the same properties, same kinds of relationships as the electron, but it's more massive. So it's a particle. And I guess maybe we should mention that the universe has particles, or at least the potential to create particles or further to exist particles,

and a muon is one of these particles. Yeah. There are lots of particles that make up me and you and all the normal matter that's out there. If you drill inside of us, you find molecules and atoms, and those atoms are made of protons and electrons and electrons. The protons and neutrons are made out of corks. So at the most fundamental level, everything that you and I are made out of and everything that I eat, including steaks and electrons,

cows are made up of upcorks and down quarks and electrons. So those are the three basic building blocks of normal matter. But there are other kinds of particles out there that the universe can make. They're sort of on the menu, but they're not stable and they're not involved in building normal everyday atomic matter. So there's sort of various categories of particles out there, ones that can be made and exist all over the universe and ones that can be made but only exist briefly. Or at least in the current universe that we have, right? I think we talked about maybe before, like maybe in the early universe, the particles like muons were common and they would hang out. Yeah, the frequency at which you find, these particles definitely depends on the

temperature of the universe because the unstable particles, muons, charm corks, top corks are a lot more massive than the other particles. They take more energy. These days, it's rarer to create that kind of energy because the universe is more spread out and colder. Back in their early days of the universe. It wasn't as hard to get enough energy together to make a muon or a top core. They always have a short lifetime, though. They still don't last very long, but they're made much more often in the early universe. These days, it takes more specialized conditions like humans smashing particles together or cosmic rays hitting the atmosphere to create the conditions to make these weird particles. They still don't last for very long. So like the muon, you said,

only lives for a few microseconds, right? Yeah, the muon lives for 2.2 microseconds before it to Ks into an electron and a couple of neutrinos. And we call the muon like a cousin of the electron because it has a lot of the similar properties. It's negatively charged like the electron is. It's paired with the neutrino the way an electron is. So in our sort of table of particles, we put the quarks in one category in these other particles we call leptons in another category because the muon and like the electron also doesn't

feel the strong nuclear force that the quarks do. I see. So it's basically an electron. but somehow it just has more mass to it like the label that says this is this is how much an electron way it just happens to be more for the muon but other than that it's almost exactly the same like it has the same electrical charge and all the other quantum values right yeah it's about 200 times more massive than the electron and nobody knows why that is like why does the electron have this mass and the muon have that mass these are just numbers that we've discovered in the universe without any

explanation. You might think that the Higgs gives an explanation for why some particles have more mass and some have less. And it's true that the muon has more mass than the electron because the Higgs interacts with it more, giving it more mass. But that doesn't explain why there's a difference. It just kicks the can down the road. Instead of asking, why does the muon have more mass than the electron. We now ask, why does the muon interact with the Higgs more than the electron does? The Higgs explains what mass is, but not why some particles have more or less of it. It's still just two numbers without an explanation. Now those two numbers are interaction strength instead of mass. And there's a third version of the electron called the tau, which is even

more massive. And this is the general pattern of the particles. Each of the particles we talked about the electron, the upcork, the downcork, has two copies of it, which are more massive. So this is some deep symmetry, some structure to the universe that we've observed, we've organized, we've seen the pattern, we've laid it out of the table, but we've not understood it. And the Mewon was like one of the first clues we had that there was more out there to the universe than just the particles that made up our matter. But I guess, you know, what does it mean that it only lists for 2.2 microseconds? Like, does that even count as existing?

you know like why you can call it a thing if it's only around for 2.2 microseconds you know like can it move around that much or or is this one of these like relativistic things where to us it it lives for 2.2 microseconds but maybe it's going really fast it lives for a really long time i think yes to all of that although you know the timescale is always relative like we only live for 100 years on the time scale of the universe that's basically nothing do we even count as existing i would say yes right because timescales are relative to some other particles like the top cork lives for 10 to the minus 23 seconds but we still think that it's a thing like the neutron lasts for i think 11 minutes before it decays so these timescales are all relative what we actually mean by 2.2 microseconds is in the muon's rest frame like if you had a muon in front of you at rest and you started a clock when it was created and you waited until it decayed that would be 2.2 microseconds but you're right relativity plays a big role Mewans are often moving really, really fast, especially when they're created in the atmosphere. So if they're moving near the speed of light, then a clock that's moving with them is slowed down.

And so the reason muons can actually survive from the top of the atmosphere where they're made to hit us on the ground is because their time is slowed. So from our perspective, they can last for much, much longer than 2.2 microseconds, long enough to make it to the surface of the earth. And what does it mean that it decays or does it disintegrate? Does it, like, the energy just diffuses or transforms it to something else? What does that actually mean? Yeah, sometimes we think about decay is like something breaks up and you get the component bits. It's like cracking something open, breaking it into its basic Legos, like an atom broken up into its protons and neutrons.

That's not what's happening here because when a muon decays, it turns into an electron and two neutrinos, but it's not like the electron and those neutrinos were inside the muon. It's not like the muon is made of the electron and the two neutrinos. Instead, think of that energy is passing from the muon field to the electron field and the neutrino fields. Remember that all these particles are really just ripples in universe spanning fields that fill all of space. Every part of space has a muon field and electron field and the three different neutrino fields. So what's happening here is that those fields are coming into contact. They're interacting. In the muon field, the oscillations in that field are not stable. They like to decay down

into the electron field and the neutrino fields. So that's what's happening here. But maybe a question is like, why is it so unstable? Like what makes the muon field, which makes muons prone to be to basically dissipating or disappearing and not, for example, the electron field, which seems super duper stable? The electron would like to decay, but there's nothing for it to decay into because it's the lowest mass particle in this chain. It's the lightest charged particle. And so the muon can decay to an electron, which is a lower mass particle. And so it does because in doing so, it spreads out the energy.

The universe doesn't like to have a lot of energy concentrated in one place. It likes to spread it out. It's like entropy at a most basic level. And so a high mass particle will tend to decay into lower mass particles if it can because that provides more arrangements of that energy. Instead of having all of it just in mass, now you have it in a lower mass particle plus lots of different possible momentum states. So like the quantum mechanical probabilities are just much more for lower mass particles

and so they're more likely to happen. But I guess maybe why can't the electron break into something smaller? Is it just like, we just haven't seen it do that? Or maybe it's impossible? Well, we haven't seen an electron decay. We think electrons are stable, though it's possible that electrons live for like a trillion years. We just never seen one decay because they just last for a long, long time. It's the same with the proton.

We think the proton is stable, but we don't know. We've never seen one decay. So we think it might be stable or very, very, very long lived. But for the electron to decay, there would have to be something for it to decay into that also has electric charge because electric charge is conserved. It can't just go away. We don't know of any lower mass charged particle than the electron. So it's sort of like the bottom rung on the ladder, which is why energy sort of gets stuck there.

I see. Okay. So then the muon decays because it can decay into other particles. Does it get triggered by something? Or if you just leave a muon there, it'll be like, okay, I'm done. And then it breaks apart. If you just leave a muon in the vacuum, it will decay. So muons flying through space will decay on their own.

They can also interact with stuff because they have charged. They can interact with electrons and they can interact with protons and all sorts of stuff. So if you slam them into a block of lead, for example, they will interact and that can also trigger the decay. But muons on their own will also just decay. Can they appear out of nowhere? Like what does it take to make a muon or how are they made if they're a thing in the universe? Is it just whenever you have enough energy concentrated into one spot or what's the origin story of a muon? So the origin story is that you get enough energy into sort of a higher mass field, a field that can decay into muons.

Energy likes to flow down to lower mass fields like rungs down the ladder. So you've got to get enough energy into a higher mass field and then it can decay into muons. So the typical way that muons are made naturally in our environment is that you have a cosmic ray, which is like a proton, slamming into some particle in the atmosphere, which creates a lot of energy density in one space. And then you create some very massive, unstable particle, and a lot of particles decay into muons. So you might create like a pion or a kion. These are more massive particles that like to decay into muons. And then those decay in the atmosphere, giving you a muon, which flies down to the surface of the earth. But then you need, where does the charge come from? Protons are charged,

right? So the charge comes from the cosmic ray. And also there's lots of charge in the upper atmosphere. Even a neutron slamming to a particle in the upper atmosphere and like disintegrating an oxygen molecule can create showers of charged particles. Where does the negative charge come from? Isn't a photon neutral? Well, first of all, we have two flavors of muons. We have negative muons, which are the normal ones and then anti-muons, which are positively charged. In particle physics, we don't really care so much about it. And both of them are created in the upper atmosphere. So we have anti-muons and muons created in the upper atmosphere. But your question is a good one. if you start from a positively charged proton, how you end up making like a negatively charged

muon? The answer is that there's just a lot more stuff involved in this interaction than we're describing because a proton is a big complicated bag of quarks and he slams into something else in the atmosphere, which is a big complicated bag of other protons and neutrons. So there's plenty of charges around to create something which decays into a negatively charged particle and balance it out with all the rest of the stuff. So a proton can turn into a huge shower of negative and positive particles with a total charge of plus one. So you can have lots of muons and anti-mi-ons created in these showers. All right.

Well, whether you're pro or anti-mewon, maybe is the question of the episodes. Can we use a muon to see inside of things and maybe put these giant particles to use? That's the question. Let's dig into that. But first, let's take a quick break. Ah, come on. taking so long. This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon,

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Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't. trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. It's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them. I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet.

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Right, we're talking about the electron's cousin, more massive cousin, the muon, and whether it can be used to see inside of things like steaks and cows, perhaps. And also maybe solving mysteries of archaeology. Ooh, you mean like ancient buried cows? Yes, maybe ancient buried cows literally. Did early man eat steak or not? Or were they vegan? Can you age a steak for thousands of years and still have it be tasty?

Did paleo man actually follow the paleo diet? We might use mions for that. All right, so we talked about what the mion is. It's the more massive cousin of the electron and that it rarely lasts more than 2.2 microseconds in nature in the universe. So if it's so elusive and unstable, how did we discover this heavy particle? Well, it turns out that muons are every. Because cosmic rays are constantly slamming into the upper atmosphere, creating showers of particles, a lot of which turned into muons.

So there are 10,000 muons per square meter per minute at the surface of the Earth. By cosmic rays, you mean like just other particles going really, really fast, somehow hitting the Earth. Exactly. Sometimes people think that space is a vacuum, it's emptiness, there's nothing out there. But the sun is pumping out protons and electrons and all sorts of stuff. stuff and the galaxy has lots of sources of high energy particles so we're really flying through a wind of particles meaning that you can think of them as like tiny little meteors hitting the upper atmosphere one proton at a time or maybe an iron nucleus at a time in creating a little shower of energy just the same way that a meteor hitting the atmosphere will interact

with the atmosphere and get friction and break up and slow down a tiny particle like a proton with enough energy will create a shower of particles which eventually reaches the surface of the Earth. And a lot of those are muons. There are also photons and electrons and other stuff in there. But muons are the most penetrating. They tend to pass through matter without interacting. So a lot of them make it to the surface of the Earth. And it's sort of a good thing, right? Like, if we didn't have the atmosphere and we were getting hit directly by cosmic rays, we might not be around today, right? These cosmic rays are very harmful. So it's a good thing. They're being kind of broken up into muons. Yeah, the atmosphere is like a big blanket that protects

from the radiation of outer space. When astronauts go up into space, they have to take special precautions to avoid being slammed into by all of this radiation. When there's like a solar storm, the astronauts have like a panic room they can go into with extra shielding to protect themselves from all of that radiation. But the higher up you go in the atmosphere, the more radiation you're exposed to because more of these particles survive. So every time you take a flight, for example, you're exposing yourself to more radiation. This is one reason why like flight attendants and pilots are limited to how many days a month they can work. All right.

So then the atmosphere breaks up the cosmic rays and you said turns them mostly into mons or rarely into mons? How often are mons created by these cosmic rays? It's sort of like a chain. The proton creates a bunch of particles, which then decay into something, which then decay into something. And the muon is like an end product and it tends to last the longest. So it's not like the muon dominates the production of particles.

You also make electrons and you make neutrinos and you make photons. The neutrinos and the muons are the ones that make it through the rest of the atmosphere. They tend to interact a little bit less than electrons and photons. So you see them on the surface of the earth more often. Oh, I see. You're also making a lot of electrons and other particles, but maybe like the electrons get stopped by all the remaining air in the atmosphere. Exactly.

Electrons like to interact with stuff. Electrons passing through air will interact with those molecules much more often than muons do. Mewons are more penetrating. And why is that? Are they just more antisocial? It actually has a really fascinating explanation that has to do with special relativity. And this is the power that muons have to let us see through things.

Muons are more penetrating because they have more mass. So they're 200 times more massive than the electron. Otherwise, from a particle physics perspective, they're very similar. They feel the weak force. They feel electromagnetism. They don't feel the strong force. But if you shoot a beam of muons into like a block of lead, you'll get a lot more out on the other side. than if you did with electrons, and the reason is their mass?

Is it like they have more inertia? Is that kind of what you're getting at? Just like, you know, if I shoot a small pebble into a pool or something, or if I shoot a bowling ball through it, like the bowling ball will get through the pool further, or is it some other kind of mechanism? It's another mechanism. It's actually because they are interacting less

because they see less of the material. It's a special relativity effect. If you have an electron and a muon at the same energy, the muon is actually going slower. because it's more massive, like more of the energy is taken up creating the mass of the muon. So if you give them the same energy, the muon is moving slower as a lower velocity than the electron at the same energy because it has more mass. But so then you're sort of constraining things to be all the same energy.

Yeah, exactly. Because it's the typical energy that these particles are produced at in these showers. So if you have an electron and muon at the same energy, the muon is going slower. And that affects how it interacts because it sees less of the material. to an electron moving it nearly the speed of light, everything in front of it is squeezed by special relativity. Remember we talked about how things moving near the speed of light look shorter. That's also true from their perspective. Electron whizzing through the atmosphere sees the distance to the surface of the earth as closer than we see it because it's moving fast relative to the surface of the earth.

So things are squeezed. As a result, it can interact with more the atmosphere. Or another way to think about it is like the atmosphere is denser because all that gas is like Lorenz-controlled. in front of it into something a little more dense. So we can interact with more of the atmosphere because it's moving at a higher speed and it has more of this special relativity enhancement. Wait, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me. Like you're saying like the rest of the atmosphere to an electron

because it's moving fast, the atmosphere looks thinner and more dense. And so it's harder to get through it. But it's still the same length to us, isn't it? Like it's squeezed, but it's still the same, It's going through the same amount of stuff as the slower muon, no? Yeah, but it sees more of the material at once. It's like it has more atoms to interact with. So this is a quantum mechanical process and it has like a probability to interact with an atom.

An electron flies by an atom. There's a chance it's going to interact and a chance that it's not. The more atoms that flies by, the more likely it's going to interact and lose some of its energy. So if you squeeze more atoms into the same space, then it's got a higher chance of interacting. And what special relativity does is because the electron is moving faster, it Lorentz contracts the stuff in front of it, basically squeezes in more atoms at once. I see.

You sort of have to change the way you're thinking about how these particles interact. Like you're saying like an electron when it hits a wall, it's not actually touching the wall. It just gets close enough to it that there's some sort of quantum mechanical transmission between the two that makes them technically interact, right? Yeah, exactly. And that's why, for example, neutrinos can pass through a light year of lead. They're passing through the same material and they're not like dodging around those particles.

It's not a mechanical physical interaction of things touching. It's a quantum mechanical interaction of forces. The neutrino just doesn't interact with those particles at all. It like phases right through that stuff because it doesn't feel electromagnetism. It only has a smaller chance to interact with every single particle. So that's why neutrinos pass through almost everything. And that's why there's a difference between the penetrating path. power of muons and electrons.

Muons being more massive at the same energy are effectively moving slower, so they have less of this special relativity boost where they can interact with otherwise further away atoms that now look closer to them and so they can feel their fields. So as the electron is showering down, coming down the atmosphere, you're saying it sees the bottom of the atmosphere is closer, which might make it more likely to interact.

But I guess the weird thing is that, you know, If it does interact with the bottom of the atmosphere, wouldn't it mean it made it through the atmosphere? And so it's really, isn't it sort of the same thing, probability? It's a cool way to look at it, but he can interact with the bottom of the atmosphere while still not being that far through the atmosphere. Because to it, the bottom of the atmosphere is not that far away. So it can still feel those fields. Right, right. It feels it closer.

But if it interacts with the bottom of the atmosphere, isn't it the same as making it through the atmosphere? Like, it skipped everything above and it made it to the bottom of the atmosphere. That means it made it through the atmosphere. It doesn't have to make it to the bottom of the atmosphere in order to interact with things at the bottom of the atmosphere. Remember, all of these things are action at a distance. You're feeling the fields of things. Two electrons don't have to touch each other in order to interact.

They just have to feel their field. Or I guess maybe what I mean. It's like, what's the difference between an electron that makes it through the atmosphere and interacts at the bottom of the atmosphere and an electron that sees the bottom of the atmosphere is closer and interacts with it. Aren't they both the same result?

that don't both mean that they made it through the atmosphere? So a higher speed electron is more likely to interact because it sees more the atmosphere. And it's going to interact at a higher altitude than a lower velocity electron, which doesn't see as much of the atmosphere because of special relativity boost. And so even if you're interacting with things that are lower down, your actual location is still higher up. Oh, I see. You were talking about it might decay before it reaches the bottom of the atmosphere.

It's like not necessarily interacting with the bottom of the atmosphere. like if it touches the bottom of the atmosphere it means it made it through the atmosphere doesn't it? Well electrons don't decay right all they can do is interact but again you can interact with something at the bottom of the atmosphere without being there right the same way like the earth is interacting with the sun

without touching the sun because it can feel its gravity at a distance all right well let's assume that then that's the case and so you're saying muons can make it through more of the atmosphere or anything in particular just because they're moving they tend to be moving slower although if you had a fast moving

muon that wouldn't be the case. Exactly. And we actually see those at the large Hadron Collider. We can make muons with enough energy that they're moving at very relativistic speeds and they interact with matter like electrons do. So we can see like muon created showers when we happen to make a really, really high velocity muon. It's just a feature of muons and electrons at the energies that they tend to be produced at in our cosmic rays here on Earth because of the ratio of their masses. I guess. Couldn't you just use a slower moving? electron. Wouldn't that be the equivalent of a slow-moving muon? Then the electron could penetrate things more. Yeah, it's a good question. You can slow down electrons, but then there are other

effects that are going to come into play that are going to make it interact more. So there isn't a window there for electrons to do the same trick that muons can do. I think what you're really saying is like you're trying to use muons, not as a general concept, but muons that are particularly created in the cosmic rays when they interact and they slam into the atmosphere, you're trying to to put forward the idea of using these muons that are showering us as maybe like an x-ray machine. Yeah, exactly. Muons have this window of energy in which they can penetrate really, really deeply. If they move more slowly, then they run into the same atomic physics that electrons have.

They can get captured. If they move faster, then they get the relativistic effects and they interact just like electrons. But muons have this special window, this energy range, in which they can pass through a lot of matter, much more than x-rays can. X-rays can pass through some kinds of matter, which is why you can use. them to see your bones and inside your body, but muons can pass through a lot more matter than x-rays can. X-rays, for example, cannot pass through huge blocks of granite. But you sort of skip through something, which is you said electrons, even if you slow them

down, are not as good as muons for x-rays applications. And why is that? Well, they'll get captured by atoms, like electrons moving slowly will just get captured. But not a muon? A muon moving really slowly also will get captured. Yeah. So a muon has a window. It's got a minimum energy to do this and a maximum energy in order to do this penetrating trick. So then you were saying how were these mions discovered? So these mons were discovered in cosmic rays. People were studying electrons and somebody had even discovered the anti-electron.

And they're studying these particles by watching them move in magnetic fields and seeing how they curve. And they saw something which looked kind of like an electron and had a charge like an electron. They occurred in a magnetic field the same direction as an electron. but it didn't curve as much and it penetrated much more deeply. Like you could put slabs of lead in front of your detector and you would still see it. So it was 1936, physicists at Caltech first discovered these things. And they bend less in a magnetic field because of their mass, right? Basically their inertia or is it also some weird quantum interaction?

No, it's a very classical thing. It's just because of their mass, yeah. I see. All right, well, let's get into how you might use muons to penetrate things. see inside of things, maybe discover ancient artifacts inside of pyramids. So let's dig into that. But first, let's take another quick break. Ah, come on. Why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient. Still using yesterday's tech, upgrade to the ThinkPad X1 Carbon, Ultra light,

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December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, at 6.33 p.m., everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal. Apparently, the explosion actually impelled metal glass. The injured were being loaded into ambulances. Just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of enemy emerged, and it was here to stay. terrorism law and order criminal justice system is back in season two we're turning our focus to a threat

that hides in plain sight that's harder to predict and even harder to stop listen to the new season of law and order criminal justice system on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts my boyfriend's professor is way too friendly and now I'm seriously suspicious. Oh, wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend has been hanging out with his young professor a lot.

He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now, he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Now, hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That sounds totally inappropriate. Well, according to this person, this is her boyfriend's former professor and they're the same age. And it's even more likely that they're cheating. He insists there's nothing between them.

I mean, do you believe him? Well, he's certainly trying to get this person to believe him because he now wants them both to meet. So, do we find out if this person's boyfriend really cheated with his professor or not? To hear the explosive finale, listen to the OK Storytime podcast on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Imagine that you're on an airplane, and all of a sudden you hear this. Attention passengers.

The pilot is having an emergency, and we need someone, anyone, to land this plane. Think you could do it? It turns out that nearly 50% of men think that they could land the plane with the help of air traffic control. And they're saying like, okay, pull this, until this. Pull that. Turn this. It's just. I can do my eyes close.

I'm Mani. I'm Noah. This is Devin. And on our new show, no such thing. We get to the bottom of questions like these. Join us as we talk to the leading expert on overconfidence. Those who lack expertise lack the expertise they need to recognize. so they lack expertise.

And then, as we try the whole thing out for real. Wait, what? Oh, that's the run right. I'm looking at this thing. Listen to no such thing on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. We're talking about meons and how you can use them to see inside of things. And we talked about how meons sort of have an extra penetrating effects more than its cousin, the electron, because it's heavier.

And so the idea is then to use this like an x-ray, basically, like shoot it at something. And if it gets through, then that tells you what's inside of the thing. Yeah, you can sort of use it as a way to measure the density of something. If you have an object and you don't know if inside of it is nothing like a vacuum or a huge block of super dense uranium. you can try to shoot it with a bunch of muons and count how many come out. By figuring out how many make it through, you can tell what the density of something is. This only works if you have something which has a chance to make it through. If you just shoot photons at a block, then none of them are going to make it through.

They're all going to get absorbed. It doesn't tell you anything about what's inside. But if you have a particle which has a chance to make it through for some densities, then you can measure the rate at which it does make it through and figure out what the density of that stuff was. Right, right. I guess it's sort of like x-rays. Like x-rays, if I should shine a flashlight onto my body, it's going to bounce off the skin, or at least most of the photons, because the light is at a certain wavelength.

But if I change the wavelength to that of an x-ray, it'll go through my body, sort of. Yeah, exactly. Some of the x-rays will make it through. And if you have an x-ray detector on the other side, you can pick that up. And by looking at the pattern of where the x-rays made it through and didn't make it through, you can tell what the density of stuff is. And that's how you can tell the difference between, like, bone or metal and soft tissues, which have different densities and different

absorption for the x-rays. So it's exactly the same principle for muons, except that muons will make it through things that x-rays will not survive, which allows you to effectively x-ray or muon ray other kinds of things that you couldn't otherwise see inside. So in the case of an x-ray, an x-ray can go through my body because it's a different wavelength, which what makes it go through my body more than, say, the light from a flashlight? So x-rays have more energy, their higher frequency, right? And the interaction with a photon with the materials in your body depends on the energy.

But a whole episode about transparency, why photons can go through some things and can't go through other things. And it's all about whether they will interact. Photons can interact with matter depending on their energy, they can get absorbed if there are atoms out there that can eat them. Because atoms only like to eat photons that are a particular frequency, right? Yeah, exactly. Like they don't just like any photon.

have to be a special frequency because of quantum mechanics. Yeah, they have various energy levels. They have these ladders of energies so they can absorb photons of like just the right energy and that affects what photons can pass through your body or through glass or through metal or any kind of stuff. So that's why x-rays can go through things more than regular light. And we talked about how muons can do that too. Why is that?

Because they don't, they have a specific energy range that makes them go through. but not interact with the atoms say inside my body. Yeah, exactly. At certain energy range, they won't be captured by atoms and they're not quite going fast enough to have a special relativistic boost where they interact with lots more atoms than otherwise. And so they can make it through a lot of this material.

And so you can see muons, even if you're like deep underground, you put a muon detector like meters and meters underground. Those muons will pass right through that solid rock and hit your muon detector. Now, is the idea that you're shooting these muons? say like you're creating them and shooting them with like an x-ray gun or a mu-ray gun and then catching them on the other side or is the idea that you're using the ones that are showering down on us from the atmosphere in principle you could do both right if you have a

muon beam then you could put stuff in the muon beam in order to do these kind of tests there is a muon beam at cern and we've like put cell phones in it and stuff like that it's a lot of fun but it's hard to build a muon beam it's hard to point a muon beam it's hard to bring stuff to a muon beam. Why? Why is it hard to bring stuff to the muon beam? No, like, why is it hard to make a muon shoot a gun? Yeah, great question. Mouons are created from the decays of other particles. So the way you make a muon beam is actually you smash protons into like a block of material like graphite, which creates a shower of other stuff. It's basically simulating what's happening in the upper atmosphere. Then a lot of those things decay into muons. So you need a proton

accelerator of sufficient energy and there just aren't that many of those. They're not the that portable. You need like a linear accelerator, you need magnets to filter some of the stuff out. How big would it have to be? Like can you make it a handheld version? Or do you need like a building size, anything to shoot neurons? Yeah, that's a great question. What's the smallest muon gun in the world? Definitely the size of a large physics laboratory. Not something you pick up and carry. Though you might be able to like put it in the back of a flatbed truck. But mostly it's unnecessary because the world is filled with muons from cosmic rays. Like there's constant stream of these things just naturally produced in the atmosphere. And you can just use

those. What do you mean? Like there's, we're surrounded or being penetrated by mons from all directions all the time? Not from all directions from above, right? These things are made in the upper atmosphere and are streaming down to us. Again, there's 10,000 muons per square meter per minute. So there's not a small number of muons passing through us. And so if you want to measure the density of something, you just put like a muon detector underneath it and count how many muons are making it. And then you can tell how many were absorbed by the material. And that tells you what the density of it was. But aren't mions coming at us from the sides as well? Like aren't there cosmic rays hitting us from all directions? There's definitely an angular

dependence, but most of them come straight down. That's the most likely direction. All right. So then the idea is that if I want to see through something, I just put a neon detector under it. And so what are these muon detectors made out of? How do you make a muon detector if muons go through things so easily? The original sort of old school ones are these films. Now muons are hard to stop, but they're not that hard to see. Like they will leave a little trail of evidence as they go. For example, you can build a cloud chamber in your garage, which is just like a transparent box filled with water vapor super saturated in the air. And as muons fly through it, they won't be stopped. They won't lose a lot of energy, but they will interact.

with those things and create a stream of droplets. So you can actually build a muon detector like at home with simple materials. There's all sorts of fun instructions on YouTube that you can follow. So they'll leave like breadcrumbs for where they were. The original ones were like film and motion blocks. These days we use like charged gases or scintillating plastics in order to see these muons. I see you don't stop the nuance. You just kind of see the evidence of them going through.

Yeah, exactly. It's hard to stop the muon for them to interact in a significant enough way. to get slowed down to deposit all of their energy, but they will leave a little trace of energy as they go by if you have the right setup. So it's not that hard to detect muons. Interesting. All right. So then what kinds of things have we seen with a mion ray? Have we seen instead of a cow? Our McDonald's hamburger? I don't know that anybody's tried that. You know, put a cloud chamber under a cow to see

what it's eaten. I do not know if that experiment has been done. So I don't know if we have muon raid a cow. Maybe there's going to start counting YouTube to do that. One of the first applications of this was to measure like how much rock and the density of rock over a tunnel. Like you're building a tunnel through a mountain. You can put a muon detector in the tunnel and you can use it to measure the total mass of the rock or effectively the density of the rock that's above you to measure your overburden

because you're basically shooting through the rock with the muons and you can tell by counting how many muons make it to your tunnel, the density. of the rock. So for like construction projects. That was the first application. But then in the 60s, a physicist thought, oh, let's use this to basically x-ray the pyramids. Because a lot of people wonder like if there's something in the pyramids or are there hidden chambers in the pyramids?

Nobody wants to take the pyramids apart because they're obviously treasures of humanity, but we would like to see inside the pyramids in a non-invasive way. So in the 60s, Louis Alvarez thought, oh, let's use muons to see in the inside the pyramids to see if there's like an opening or a gap or like a big void somewhere that nobody's discovered. Ooh. Wouldn't that require you to put the muon detector under the pyramid? Yes, exactly. So you do need some access to the pyramids. And there are some openings, but this is a limiting factor. You can't just like drill under the pyramid and put a muon detectors everywhere. There are some shafts and some chambers we know about. What you can do is put the muon detector there in the bottom of the as far below the pyramid as you can and then measure the rate of the muons and compare it to calculations you do like how many muons should I see if there are no additional chambers or how many muons going in this direction versus that direction

if there's a chamber here or a chamber there. But wait, if I put a detector under a pyramid, let's say it's like a tile the size of like a one by one foot square, it can only detect the muons that are coming from right above that one square foot area or can it detect muons from all directions? If you have like a one foot tile, it'll detect any muon that passes through. through that tile coming from any direction. And so if you have a few of those, then you can start to get directional information

if there's like a difference in how many muons you see in one place versus another. What do you mean? Well, the way you can tell like the difference between parts of your body is that you have an x-ray detector that's not just a point. It's like a whole array or it takes an image. You can tell how many x-rays came through this part of your body

versus that other part of your body. So imagine if you could put x-rays all over the bottom of the pyramid, then you could like muon x-ray the whole pyramid. You can't do that, but you can put a few here and a few there based on what access points you do have, and you can get like a very rough image of what's going on inside the pyramid from your various detectors. But wouldn't that just give you like a couple of pixels, basically, of an image? Yeah, it's very rough, but it's better than nothing, right?

Right now we have basically no image. And so this is like a way to crack it open a little bit and give you some very rough idea of what might be there. I guess alternatively you could create a muon ray gun and shoot it from the side, right? Wouldn't that be more convenient? Yeah, absolutely. You had a big muon detector on one side and a big muon gun on the other side

and then you could really muonograph the pyramids. That would be awesome. Were you about to say you can muon the heck out of it? Are these muons dangerous? Like if I create a muon gun and I aim it at somebody, is it going to harm them? Just like x-rays are sort of harmful if you take an x-ray gun and shoot it in a person for too long.

Absolutely. These are radiation and muons are responsible for mutations in our DNA. They're part of the natural radiation of our environment and they do cause mutations. So yes, in principle, they can cause cancer, right? So an intense dose of muons from a beam could definitely give you cancer. It's not something to play around with. Does it sound like a great idea to make a muon gun or a good idea for certain applications, perhaps? Yeah, exactly.

And they're difficult to shield, right? Once you start that muon beam, it's going to pass right through your pyramid and then through your detector. And then it's just going to keep going for kilometers and kilometers. So it's not like you can have a beam dump or something to protect people from the other side. Well, I guess it would just shoot off into space, right? Because the Earth is curved or would gravity pull them back down. No, you're right there, shoot off into space. So maybe you just need to angle it up a little bit.

Oh, interesting. But then you might be like shooting it maybe an alien civilization out there. They might take offense. Yeah, you could accidentally be sending them a muonograph of our pyramids. I don't know how they would interpret that. That's right. Or a picture of cows. They'd be like, ooh, that looks tasty.

Let's go invade them. But people have actually done this for the pyramids without building a muon gun. They've just used cosmic rays and measured the rate at which the cosmic rays make it through the pyramids to see are there new cavities inside the pyramids? And what have they found? So the first time they looked, they looked in one pyramid. They didn't find anything unusual. But then later on, actually in 2015, they did this for the Great Pyramid. And they found what they called the Big Void.

And then another opening, they labeled maybe a corridor. What they're seeing is a region of the pyramid that seems to have lower density than the rest of the pyramid. So this could be like a big opening, maybe a treasure chamber filled with all sorts of jewels and fascinating information about ancient Egypt. Or maybe it's just like a gap they left in the pyramid to reduce the pressure on the rest of it. You know, it could just be like a construction trick. We don't exactly know, but there's some sort of large cavity within the Great Pyramid. Interesting. I guess what you're saying is making me feel a little skeptical.

Just because you needed like a lot of space underneath the pyramid to create these to be, you know, certain that there's something there, right? You need to basically put a lot of these neon detectors under a pyramid. Like just putting like a couple doesn't seem like you'd be able to find or resolve any kind of real details, can you? Yeah, your resolving power definitely improves as you have more detectors. Or just more space to put these detectors. But you'd be surprised what you can accomplish with a few detectors, the same way that like a radio array is just a few detectors. detectors scattered over kilometers and kilometers by measuring the difference between signals received by one antenna and another, you can get a lot of directional information and resolving power, almost as if you had the detector the same size as a full array, not quite, but almost as if.

So you do some complex data analysis and you can recover a lot of information with just a few measurements. Right, right, but those arrays, they're antennas, right, which you can focus and point in the certain directions to kind of get the equivalent of a giant lens. This feels like, you know, laying out a bunch of photographic negatives of film out on the ground and trying to get an image from that. Yeah, it's difficult. And if you look at the reconstruction of the void, you see it's very fuzzy. They're very uncertain, but exactly where it is, how big it is. They have no idea what shape it is.

This is not like a crystal clear image the way an x-rays at all. This is just like a hint that there's an under density somewhere inside this pyramid. All right. Well, it seems like a pretty cool application that maybe lets us see through mountains and pyramids and potential bovine animals. Especially if they're the size of pyramids or mountains. What else can you use these muon rays for to detect? People have used it actually to see inside mountains like Vesuvius, for example, the famous volcano.

They've used muons to try to understand what's going on inside Vesuvius to maybe do a better job predicting of when it's going to blow. But don't you need to get under Vesuvius to do this? The best case scenario is to have a bunch of mion detectors under Vesuvius. you put a bunch around it, then you can get muons which shoot through sort of at an angle, especially if you can measure the angle of the muons, so you can tell whether they came through the mountain or whether they came from the other side, then you can get some good information. Wait, you can angle these detectors? Yeah, absolutely.

The detectors are not just like a flat sheet. They can be thick, and so you can see a whole track of a muon. You can tell which direction it was going. Not just that a muon was there, but the direction of its motion. Interesting. So you can angle these then, kind of like an antenna. Yeah, kind of like an antenna, exactly. Okay, it seemed like maybe you were saying you can't.

No, you can. The thicker they are, the better angle measurement you can make. Like a cloud chamber that you can build in your garage, you can see the whole track of the muon flying through. It's really pretty cool. All right. So geology and archaeology, those are pretty cool uses for particle physics. Yeah, exactly. So maybe particles will not just teach us about the nature of the universe. They might teach us about what's going on inside mountains and what humans have hidden away inside pyramids.

All right. Well, another great justification for Daniel's job at the university. I'm not me-in-lawing anything, but I'm definitely favorite of it. I feel like half of these episodes are just a commercial for your job in particle physics. They're a commercial for particle physics and for physics in general and trying to understand the nature of the universe and, yeah, why it matters. Should we have a disclaimer here at the bottom? Every episode is indirectly Daniel's self-promotion, yes.

Yeah, there you go. Yeah, absolutely. I'm totally transparent about that. All right. Well, engineers, please clip that and put it at the bottom of every episode. It'll be like the fine print. And every conversation I have basically with everybody. Unless you're talking about something else, perhaps. It's all particles, man. Everything is made of particles. Oh, interesting. Even non-particles.

All right. Well, we hope you enjoyed that. Thanks for joining us. See you next time. For more science and curiosity, come find us on social media where we answer questions and post videos. We're on Twitter, Discord, Insta, and now TikTok. Thanks for listening, and remember that Daniel and Jorge Explain the Universe is a production of IHeartRadio. For more podcasts from IHeartRadio, visit the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Come on, why is this taking so long? This thing is ancient.

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Intel Core Ultra processors so you can work, create, and boost productivity all on one device. December 29th, 1975, LaGuardia Airport. The holiday rush, parents hauling luggage, kids gripping their new Christmas toys. Then, everything changed. There's been a bombing at the TWA terminal, just a chaotic, chaotic scene. In its wake, a new kind of. Enemy emerged. Terrorism. Listen to the new season of Law and Order criminal justice system on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

My boyfriend's professor is way too friendly, and now I'm seriously suspicious. Wait a minute, Sam. Maybe her boyfriend's just looking for extra credit. Well, Dakota, luckily, it's back to school week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This person writes, my boyfriend's been hanging out with his young professor a lot. He doesn't think it's a problem, but I don't trust her. Now he's insisting we get to know each other, but I just want her gone. Hold up. Isn't that against school policy? That seems inappropriate. Maybe find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast and the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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