
Muons: the little-known particles helping to probe the impenetrable - sohkamyung
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-05254-2
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frabert
When I was in high school I participated to the EEE project (Extreme Energy
Events), which used various vapour chamber-like detectors scattered all around
Italian schools to calculate the trajectories of muon showers produced by
cosmic rays hitting the Earth's atmosphere. We used the trajectories to
approximate where the cosmic ray hit the atmosphere. Turns out you have to
take into account quite a lot of relativistic effects to get precise readings

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kovrik
Question: why muons? Why not electrons?

Or why not neutrons, which are not charged (hence should penetrate better, if
I understand it correctly)?

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cozzyd
Electrons can interact in additional ways, so they aren't as penetrating.
Neutrons are rarer than muons in cosmic ray showers and are also much more
difficult to detect.

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FiatLuxDave
I saw a presentation for using muons to image the inside of asteroids:
[https://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/jan2014/presentations...](https://www.lpi.usra.edu/sbag/meetings/jan2014/presentations/08_1600_Prettyman_SBAG.pdf)

