Next they will tell us that peanut butter is sticky.
We ought to find out what great studies, if any, have been done investigating what direct affect these particles have on the atmosphere generally, on clouds specifically, and on atmospheric temperature.
*ping*
Interesting things still available to discover. Most of all one must ask the correct questions. Good work by the lab that sponsored this investigation. Now to digress...
How many know that a Muon is a charged particle very similar in properties to an electron, a particle often mentioned in passing upon introduction to electrical circuitry? The Muon cousin is a few hundred times more heavy than the more familiar electron, has a short lifetime of a mere fraction of a second, and presents the quandary of a missed opportunity for exploiting an energy source.
A Muon can cause nuclear fusion just by it’s introduction to Deuterium. It plays a substitution game within an atom of fusion fuel, taking the place of the more common electron. As it has more mass, the heavy Muon reduces the effective distance at which the positive charge of two fuel atoms would repel the other below a threshold distance. Under this close approach, the two atoms can coalesce and in turn give up a part of their combined energy to reach a new stable configuration.
For various reasons such as too short a lifetime, time wasted traveling from one atom to the next atom, a tendency to become unavailable immediately after promoting a fusion, it was not practical as a nuclear fusion catalyst. It was not economical to manufacture Muons relative to energy invested versus energy recovered from the fusion produced. That problem may now go away, given that a proposed new way of mass production of Muons is valid.
A well respected Norwegian researcher (in a dire health prompted retirement) has passed on his research as the basis of a catalyst of a pulsed fusion reaction. His research delved in to the formation of ordered clusters of atoms from both light hydrogen and deuterium under certain conditions. (Either to a point will work in a similar fashion, though with notable differences in final results.) A crude analogy would be to consider formation of a crystal from a bulk material, with the unusual property of it’s shrinking to microscopic dimensions upon formation.
The clusters have the property of very tight spacing of individual atoms, such that the material achieves a greatly enhanced density. It is asserted that particular sub-variants of the clusters can be stimulated by low average energy laser light pulses to become unstable, the result of which is a pocket of high electrical potential, which serves to accelerate the remnant particle debris into the surrounding undisturbed clusters. This is an electrically driven explosion at a very small scale.
The density increase (reduction in particle spacing) within the surrounding cluster material from the explosion, serves to promote certain (proton interaction?) processes, which have at points have been described as disintegration of protons in favor of production of Meson decay chains, which ultimately result in Muons. This release of fast charged particles exceeds the combined energy expended in generating the clusters and the laser trigger input.
This is the proposed route toward production of an economical catalyst to trigger a fusion pulse reaction. The catalyzed fusion reaction further serves to amplify by a factor of a hundred or more, the initial Muon catalyst energy.
https://www.guventures.com/news/2019/4/9/zqm6oyks4jnvobjy031hl4buzt2qfc
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15361055.2018.1546090