This past Friday, officials with the U.S. Military stated that a brand new program of teams from different sectors is working together to create a subatomic particle compact source that is strong enough to be able to look through dense concrete walls, underground tunnels, and certain rooms which are multiple hundreds of meters hidden under the surface of the earth.
As stated in a press release, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) explained that the personnel would be working to make deeply penetrating terrestrial muons, which are subatomic particles about 200 times heavier than electrons. these types of particles could be used to make energy beams up to hundreds of giga-electronvolts in order to scan or characterize materials for scientific discovery or national security.
The program manager for DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office, Mark Wrobel, stated that the rapidly-advancing high-peak-power laser tech could end up producing terrestrial muons that “can travel easily through dozens to hundreds of meters of water, solid rock, or soil’ if the energy was high enough.”
“MuS2 will lay the groundwork needed to examine the feasibility of developing compact and transportable muon sources,” explained Wrobel.
Although various officials labeled the process of harnessing the primary sources used to create such muons for advanced surveillance as “tedious and not very practical,” they have ended up proving to be quite effective. Back in the late 1960’s, scientists made use of muons to look at roughly 20 percent of the still hidden interior chambers within the walls of the various grate pyramids in Egypt. To this day, scientists are still making use of cosmic radiation as a method to see inside the hidden rooms.
Many federal agencies, including the Defense Department, have made use of advanced sources to generate subatomic particles that let officials have the power to scan cargo containers with dangerous materials or test an aircraft for any unseen internal defects. But they are still not strong enough, however, to “map the core of a volcano from the outside, or peer deep underground to locate chambers and tunnels.”
Because of the overall nature of the research, Wrobel stated that teams would come from diverse research areas from within academia, national laboratories, and defense industries.
Officials stated that making muons would require the use of high-energy particles that could only be done at much bigger facilities such as the United States’ Fermilab national particle accelerator in Illinois and the European Council for Nuclear Research (CERN) facility in Switzerland.
On writer for a communications group at CERN, Sarah Charley, stated in Symmetry, an online particle magazine, that muons are the heavier and short-lived cousins of the electron that “could be the key to understanding relationships between other fundamental particles.”
“And it holds a mystery all its own,” stated Charley.
Officials with the military stated that the DARPA program stretches out over four years and is divided into two phases in which military researchers will create up to 100 giga-electronvolts to be used for experimentation, simulation, and laser technology studies.