Word: muons
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...ordinary matter, physicists had learned, was made of four basic particles: electrons, neutrinos and two kinds of quarks. But there was another family of particles, plentiful in the early universe but now found almost exclusively in nuclear accelerators, that seemed to be divided into the same four types: the muon (a sort of heavy electron), the muon neutrino and two more quarks. And in 1976, Stanford University physicist Martin Perl announced he had found a third, even heavier electron, which he dubbed the tau--a discovery that earned him the other half of this year's physics Nobel. Perl...
Brandenburg says the muon detector was but onecomponent of an all-purpose detector which about100 institutions were helping to construct...
Mann says a single university group wasill-equipped to design a detector alone. HarvardTufts and Brandeis Universities therefore sharedresources and formed the Boston Muon Consortium.Collaborators from the three universities had beenmeeting weekly at Harvard for the past three tofour years...
...this case, scientists observed the transitory trails of four particles into which a top and its antimatter twin should occasionally decay. Or did they? One clue was the detection of a muon, a close relative of the electron. At least, it appeared to be a muon. The reason scientists aren't sure is that the portion of the detector responsible for tracking muons is segmented like an orange. "And with the malice often displayed by inanimate objects," says University of Chicago physicist Henry Frisch with a sigh, "this muon went right up a crack between the segments...
...history of science is full of similar discoveries, some of which have revolutionized ideas about the universe and many of which turned out to be less than they had seemed. In the former category, for example, is the 1936 discovery of a new particle, the muon, an elementary particle similar to the electron but more massive. Existing theories had predicted no such thing, and its appearance greatly complicated high-energy physics. "Who ordered that?" grumbled theorist I.I. Rabi at the time. But the muon and its kin led eventually to a new understanding of the subatomic world...