Cari Cesarotti
speaker
212 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Cari Cesarotti’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Um, but now, now that you can attach the word death ray or death circle to that, people are like, Oh my God, neutrinos. Um, so yeah, the, the, the physics behind it is that yes, neutrinos that are more energetic will want to interact more. Um, and so we haven't had to worry about this in the past because we've never been producing TV neutrinos in a large quantity. Um,
The worry that we would have is not that neutrino rays zap a cow and then suddenly it's raining steak. That's not quite the picture. But what can happen is that all of these neutrinos that are coming off from your muon being circulated is they'll just travel in a straight line. They'll escape the experiment and they'll travel through dirt, right? Like they can just go through dirt.
And if they're high enough energy, they might interact with some atom in the dirt and they could excite the atom and then that could decay. So it's the radioactivity of neutrinos activating atoms in the ground. So if this stuff is either sufficiently underground or we have ways of absorbing the neutrinos before they permeate too far or something, again, this is accelerators.
Accelerator physicists are really, really great people that think of all kinds of wacky stuff that I would never have thought was reasonable. And this is the scientific term. You can wiggle the beam. And then when you do that, it's a diffuse enough beam that you're not activating any one patch of ground too much.
And so the overall radiation dosage, I hate to be the person to tell you this if you don't know it, but you're always being irradiated. There are always things irradiating you. You just need a sufficiently small dose to not notice. So if you can do that, then it is in fact well below any sort of legal limit and dangerous limit that you might be approaching.
Yeah, just wiggle it. Yeah.
The wiggles.
Yeah, I mean, failure is possible at every step. And I actually just got back from Fermilab yesterday to attend this really interesting workshop where people sort of get together and we're talking about what we need to make this happen. And someone showed this really beautiful table of basically all the ways in which we could fail and what impact that would have on the net collisions.
And so, yeah, the steps of failure are first, we don't produce enough muons. So this targetry thing doesn't work. We melt the target by just dumping constant protons on it. That could fail. Cooling it could fail. We might not be able to, in fact, cool it quick enough to actually have a sufficiently high, a dense enough muon beam to get any sort of reasonable number of collisions out.
So the cooling is by far the thing that could take us out the most. And that's the thing that we need to prove works before we actually make any sort of big steps to making the full-scale collider. So when people say muon collider R&D, basically we're talking about showing that this cooling and acceleration can happen.
Right, the cooling or the acceleration around the actual ring is hard because, again, that requires an entirely new mechanism for accelerating things quickly. And then even just reconstructing the collisions is hard. Because again, you have all these decay products shooting off of it.
And how do you make sure that your detector isn't constantly overwhelmed by the electrons and neutrinos coming out of these decaying muons? How do you actually see the physics of the collisions and not just the physics of muons decaying? So that's also hard. And then of course, yeah, neutrino death beam. Let's stay away from that phrasing. The neutrino radiation can be mitigated with wiggles.
Yeah. And there's also even a whole bunch of physicists that figure out how the magnets will bend the muons. Right. So like really every sort of difficult problem we have, there's an entire specialty dedicated towards solving the problem. That being said, we definitely are a bit human power limited at this point.
So if you're out there and you say, man, the thing I would love in life the most is to accelerate muons. Oh, my God, please call us. Yeah.
Yeah, if you are 10 and you want to be a part of the most exciting human experiment ever made, please stay in school. We need you.
Yeah, so I mean... I think there's a lot of ways to answer this question and I think all of them are kind of equally valid. So I think the most obvious answer that you can have is we are scientists and we want to know if you can do something, right?
So this is a kind of collider that we have theorized and there's no fundamental showstopper that would suggest that this is a deeply impossible task to do. So the fact that this is just a scientific challenge to see if you can collide muons. And this could open up an entire new generation of colliders, which are really effectively microscopes for the fundamental interactions.
The fact that this is a possibility, to me, is worth doing. If you can really open up an entirely new way to do a physics experiment, that's awesome. That in itself is very cool.
In terms of understanding sort of the fundamental problems that we talked about in the beginning, again, what's exciting about muon colliders is this was kind of, if the technology can work, which I understand is a preposterously big asterisk to put on all of this, but if the technology can work, this is by far the fastest way to take us, the fastest and the most energy efficient and compact way to take us to that energy frontier.
So given that we are kind of stumbling in the dark right now in terms of understanding where the Higgs comes from, what dark matter is, do neutrinos get mass from the same mechanism or a different one? Is there anything new about the standard model? Are there fourth generation particles? That one's a little bit wacky, but...
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