Muons can show up in three ways: either individually (the most frequent case), or as a bunch originating from a particularly energetic cosmic proton, or as an electromagnetic shower of electrons, anti-electrons and photons in case the muon interacts with matter above the installation.įigure 1 : overall concept of the cosmophone The human body is insensitive to muons, even though several muons pass through us every second. A muon is a type of heavy electron not found in ordinary matter because of its very short life time. The most penetrating of these are “muons”, which can reach sea level. As they hit the upper atmosphere, cosmic rays create avalanches of elementary particles. They are confined within the galaxy by the galactic magnetic field and travel typically several millions of years before reaching the earth. These particles can be accelerated to very high energies when they encounter gases in expansion as produced by super-novae. Our planet is continuously bombarded by cosmic rays made of protons and atomic nuclei which are emitted from throughout our galaxy. Figure 1 gives a general sketch of the concept and Figure 2 a schematic view of the technical implementation. The cosmophone is a tentative to reveal this close connection between the infinitely small and the infinitely large in a sensuous way, by detecting and imaging the continuous flow of elementary particles originating from our entire galaxy: cosmic rays. This conjunction of cosmology and particle physics is one of the most striking trends of present fundamental research. Within the Big Bang model, now corroborated by numerous observations, the energy density was so high in the first fraction of second that all kinds of sub-atomic particles existed together, forming a gas of matter, anti-matter and radiation interacting in the same way as they do in present high-energy accelerators or violent cosmic phenomena like quasars or super-novae. It was recently recognised that the properties of sub-atomic particles are intimately related to the behaviour of the Universe in its very first moments. ![]() These objects are described within the frame of quantum mechanics and Einstein relativity, which dilute the usual concepts of determinism, localisation, time and energy. In the past decades, high energy particle accelerators have revealed a new world of sub-atomic particles and forces which govern the behaviour of matter. ![]() THE INFINITELY SMALL, THE INFINITELY LARGE AND THE HIGH ENERGY DENSITY FRONTIERįundamental physics explores areas of nature which are more and more distant from common sense and usual representations of reality.
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