TIL that Hiroyuki Tanaka, who has imaged pyramids with ambient muons, is working on an underground/underwater navigation system based on coincident detection of *the same muons* by detectors on the surface and below it!
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9203741/
Heard on:
@gregeganSF - do you mean "the same muons" in the sense of some quantum trickiness? I didn't see that in the paper.
From the paper:
“Coincidence events within the time window narrower than 1 µs identify whether the same muons are detected by both the reference detector and the receiver detector.”
I don’t see how else you could obtain any information! The source is random, so the only way you can get any timing information is by detecting the same muon once as it passes through the surface detector, and then again by the detector below ground. Presumably the detector can register a muon without destroying it, because it has so much energy it can just lose a tiny bit to the detector and then continue on its way.
@gregeganSF - oh, okay, not quantum trickiness like a superposition of position eigenstates.
They say that one way to detect muons is with "plastic scintillators and photomultiplier tubes". I guess a muon travelling fast through plastic produces Cerenkov radiation. This is similar to how Ice Cube and Kamiokande detect neutrinos through the fast-moving charged particles they produce - though those experiments use huge amounts of water or ice.
One other neutrino detector whose name escapes me was measuring paths of charged particles (products of neutrino interactions) by having them induce current in a wire, and did that multiple times for each particle to find its velocity and position. (Obviously each such interaction changed the particle's path.)
@robryk - nice!
@gregeganSF