A Rare Opportunity – the Mu2e Experiment at Fermilab

The muon, a heavy cousin of the electron, was discovered in 1936. Since that time they have only ever been observed to do one of two things: 1) interact with a nucleus, or 2) decay into an electron and two neutrinos. But a new experiment at Fermilab – the Mu2e experiment – is going to look for a third thing: a muon interacting with a nucleus to produce an electron and nothing else. This is a process that’s predicted to occur very very rarely, maybe once every quadrillion muon decays, (or less!). But this very rare decay may hold the key to understanding physics at its most fundamental level. The Mu2e experiment is an ambitious endeavor whose goal is to observe this very rare decay for the first time – a discovery that could help reveal a new paradigm of particle physics. I will describe the experimental challenges, both in terms of detector technology and data analysis, involved in searching for such a subtle process.

Host: Jacobo Konigsberg