Speaker
Description
The finite lifetime of the muon remains one of the central challenges for energy-frontier muon colliders, motivating continued work in rapid acceleration, cooling, beam polarization, and mitigation of decay-induced detector backgrounds. We explore a complementary and highly speculative possibility: whether weak decay may be perturbed through coherent phase biasing of internal muon–neutrino transfer modes.
Within an impedance-network framework, the muon is modeled as a coherent multicomponent electromagnetic state whose internal degrees of freedom include scalar electric charge, vector magnetic flux quantum, and bivector magnetic moment. Weak decay is interpreted as coherent coupling of this parent state to a neutrino-sector transfer matrix containing vector magnetic flux, bivector electric flux, and trivector magnetic charge components. Particular attention is given to the electric–magnetic (eg) dyon channel, which provides a direct scalar–trivector coupling between the muon and neutrino sectors.
A longitudinal solenoidal magnetic bias is hypothesized to perturb selected internal phase relationships by an extremely small fractional amount relative to intrinsic particle field scales. However, if these local phase perturbations possess long coherence memory rather than resetting after each internal Compton-period particle–image oscillation, cumulative phase slip may develop over ~10^19 internal cycles during the laboratory-frame lifetime of a relativistic muon. Under such conditions, weak-decay phase closure may be detuned despite the small external perturbation.
Order-of-magnitude estimates based on relativistically boosted muon lifetimes, neutrino oscillation coherence scales, and internal Compton frequencies are presented. We identify the physical assumptions required for cumulative phase memory, formulate the problem in terms of the muon–neutrino transfer matrix rather than isolated muon or neutrino sectors, and propose accelerator-based tests capable of falsifying the hypothesis.
Potential implications for muon-collider staging, beam polarization, and suppression of decay-induced backgrounds are discussed.
| Working group | WG7 |
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