Register Log in  Scientific Method / Science & Exploration  As
its Tevatron collider goes dark, Fermilab ponders a muon-rich
future  Although its famous Tevatron collider will shut down on
Friday, Fermilab won't …  Will it actually work?  Researchers at
Fermilab are already performing initial studies to explore the
idea's feasibility. One thing is already clear: the muon
accelerator wouldn't operate much like anything we know now.
Machines like the Tevatron and the LHC have long chains of
accelerators that gradually ramp particles up to higher energies
before passing them to the next piece of hardware. At the
Tevatron, there's an extended process of ramping particles up to
the accelerator's maximum energy (at the LHC, the ramp-up alone
takes about half an hour), squeezing them into denser bunches,
and then scraping off any particles that are outside the main
bunch.  With muons, any ramp in energy will have to occur nearly
instantaneously, which creates its own problems. With the
current radiofrequency-based a