Discover the idea of ​​building a particle accelerator on the Moon

Upon further study of how the universe works, particle physics experiments are becoming more complex than ever.

A physicist is asking: What if we skip all those steps and set up particle physics experiments on the Moon ?

Firstly , the moon is very cold. At night, the temperature drops to minus 100 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 73 degrees Celsius). During the day, everything gets hotter, about 38 degrees Celsius. Physicists need such low temperatures for a few reasons. In accelerators, cold temperatures ensure that superconducting magnets - used to shoot particles inside an accelerator that fly close to the speed of light - do not melt.

Second , the hotter the detector, the more you have to deal with the more noise you try to confirm small signals from subatomic particles. (Higher temperatures equate to more molecules vibrating, which equals greater noise.) Besides, the lack of an atmosphere in the Moon is also a great benefit. Physicists have to drain all the air out of their accelerators and detectors. But the Moon has 10 times better vacuum than anything physicists have built in their experiments. And it does it naturally, without any effort.

On the Moon, you get a free vacuum environment.

Finally , because of the tidal lock - that is, our natural satellite takes the same time around the Earth to orbit its axis (its rotation period) - The moon always keeps the same face facing the Earth. land. This means that a beam of particles from the Moon can be turned back toward the laboratory discovered on Earth, taking advantage of long distances without having to work very hard to align the setup.

Perhaps the most valuable benefit from a physical experiment on the Moon will be the source of neutrinos .

Neutrinos are spooky, agile particles with no charge and almost no mass at all. This allows them to glide over normal matter almost imperceptibly. Needless to say, neutrinos are difficult to study. They are generated in large quantities during nuclear reactions, so all it takes is to build a nuclear power plant on the Moon and let it work. The neutrinos it produces will race to Earth, where we can collect and study them.

An annoying and mysterious characteristic of neutrinos is that they have the ability to change the type - "taste" in physical terms in flight. By having a large gap between neutrino production and detection, physicists give more neutrinos the opportunity to "change flavors" , thereby better understanding this behavior.

Neutrinos are not the only thing a facility on the Moon can shoot at Earth. Even our most powerful particle colliders cannot come close to the energy level nature can produce to release particles (to be exact, we cannot even achieve one billionth of the energy. there).

A base on the Moon can produce high energy particles in large numbers, shoot them into the atmosphere and allow us to observe raindrops from the ground, helping scientists better understand the energy. amount of the universe. But why stop there? Why not set the whole detector on the Moon? A complete particle physics experiment, with its source, accelerator and detector on the Moon, offers several advantages over Earth systems. The number one bottleneck here is the need for a highly controlled vacuum, which makes experiments on Earth relatively compact.

But on the Moon, you get a free vacuum environment. And that vacuum is much better than that used in particle collider experiments. The author proposes that there is a small technical challenge in actually going there and building sophisticated experiments on the Moon, but once this is resolved we can take big strides on Moon.