In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.
Well, for values of 'exist' equal to "within vast particle accelerators". You produce muons by a rather complicated process: First you send a proton beam at graphite, which produces kaons and pions. You focus these beams using magnetic fields, and they decay to muons. Muons are relatively long-lived, so you guide them into a circular storage ring. They decay to a muon neutrino, an electron anti-neutrino, and an electron.
I'm not sure whether accuracy is a good question in these circumstances. Our control of the muons is good enough to manipulate them as described above, and we're talking centimeter distances at quite good approximations to lightspeed, but it's not as though we care about the ones that miss, except to note that you don't go into the tunnel when the beam is active.
You do get quite a lot of other particles, but they don't have the right mass and momentum combinations for the magnets to guide them exactly into the ring, so they end up slightly increasing the radiation around the production apparatus.
The above is for the Gran Sasso experiment; there may be other specific paths to muon beams, but the general method of starting with protons, electrons, or some other easily accessible particle and focusing the products of collisions is general. Of course this means you can't get anywhere near the luminosity of the primary beams, since there's a huge loss at each conversion-and-focusing.
In response to falenas108's "Ask an X" thread. I have a PhD in experimental particle physics; I'm currently working as a postdoc at the University of Cincinnati. Ask me anything, as the saying goes.
This is an experiment. There's nothing I like better than talking about what I do; but I usually find that even quite well-informed people don't know enough to ask questions sufficiently specific that I can answer any better than the next guy. What goes through most people's heads when they hear "particle physics" is, judging by experience, string theory. Well, I dunno nuffin' about string theory - at least not any more than the average layman who has read Brian Greene's book. (Admittedly, neither do string theorists.) I'm equally ignorant about quantum gravity, dark energy, quantum computing, and the Higgs boson - in other words, the big theory stuff that shows up in popular-science articles. For that sort of thing you want a theorist, and not just any theorist at that, but one who works specifically on that problem. On the other hand I'm reasonably well informed about production, decay, and mixing of the charm quark and charmed mesons, but who has heard of that? (Well, now you have.) I know a little about CP violation, a bit about detectors, something about reconstructing and simulating events, a fair amount about how we extract signal from background, and quite a lot about fitting distributions in multiple dimensions.