Tanaz Mohayai conducting her thesis experiment in the UK.

On May 4, Tanaz Mohayai, physics Ph.D. candidate, presented the first measurement of “ionization cooling” of a beam of muons, in a rare, invited oral contribution at the International Particle Accelerator Conference in Vancouver, Canada. Mohayai is a student of Pavel Snopok, assistant professor of physics. The measurement was made in the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) at the UK’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory. Ionization cooling is a technique proposed for use in future, multi-billion-dollar muon accelerator facilities for the study of the fundamental nature of matter and energy. Such an accelerator might be built at a lab somewhere in the world to follow up on discoveries at the CERN Large Hadron Collider.

The muon is an unstable elementary particle with similar properties to those of the electron, but with a mass 200 times heavier. Muons are the most abundant component of cosmic rays reaching the surface of the earth but have never been used in a high-energy accelerator.