MUONS

 

MUONS         

                        

Scientists use outer space particles to examine the fortress wall of Xi’an city:

1. Researchers are examining the fortress wall of Xi’an, an ancient city in china, by using tiny outer space particles that can penetrate hundreds of meters of stone surfaces. Known as muons, these particles have helped them find small density anomalis, which are potential safety hazards, inside the wall.

 

2. Published in the journal of applied physics, the study, ‘High-precision muography in archaeogeophysics:A case study on Xi’an defensive walls’, has been conducted by a team of scientists from Lanzhou university, china.

 

 

Xi’an’s wall:

· Xi’an’s  wall is 12 meters high and 18 meteres thick. To analyse this 14 kilometeres long rampart, researchers deployed a technique called muon tomography, which uses muons to generate three dimensional images of such large structures.

Q. WHAT ARE MUONS?

· Muons are subatomic particles raining from space.

· The muon was discovered as a constituent of cosmic-ray particle “showers” in 1935 by American physicists carl D. Andersonand seth neddermeyer.

· They are created when the particles in Earth’s atmosphere collide with cosmic rays- clusters of high- energy particles that move through space at just below the speed of light

· It has two forms, the negatively charged muon and its positively charged antiparticle.

· They are highly unstable and exit for just 2.2 microseconds

· Muons are so heavy, they can travel through hundreds of meters of rock before getting absorbed .