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Concept
Muon-catalyzed fusion
Summary
Muon-catalyzed fusion (abbreviated as μCF or MCF) is a process allowing nuclear fusion to take place at temperatures significantly lower than the temperatures required for thermonuclear fusion, even at room temperature or lower. It is one of the few known ways of catalyzing nuclear fusion reactions.
Muons are unstable subatomic particles which are similar to electrons but 207 times more massive. If a muon replaces one of the electrons in a hydrogen molecule, the nuclei are consequently drawn 196 times closer than in a normal molecule, due to the reduced mass being 196 times the mass of an electron. When the nuclei move closer together, the fusion probability increases, to the point where a significant number of fusion events can happen at room temperature.
Methods for obtaining muons, however, require far more energy than can be produced by the resulting fusion reactions. Muons decay rapidly due to their unstable nature and cannot be usefully stored.
To create useful room-temperature muon-catalyzed fusion, reactors would need a cheap, efficient muon source and/or a way for each individual muon to catalyze many more fusion reactions. Laser-driven muon sources are one possible approach.
Andrei Sakharov and F.C. Frank predicted the phenomenon of muon-catalyzed fusion on theoretical grounds before 1950. Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich also wrote about the phenomenon of muon-catalyzed fusion in 1954. Luis W. Alvarez et al., when analyzing the outcome of some experiments with muons incident on a hydrogen bubble chamber at Berkeley in 1956, observed muon-catalysis of exothermic p–d, proton and deuteron, nuclear fusion, which results in a helion, a gamma ray, and a release of about 5.5 MeV of energy. The Alvarez experimental results, in particular, spurred John David Jackson to publish one of the first comprehensive theoretical studies of muon-catalyzed fusion in his ground-breaking 1957 paper. This paper contained the first serious speculations on useful energy release from muon-catalyzed fusion.
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Related concepts (3)
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A subcritical reactor is a nuclear fission reactor concept that produces fission without achieving criticality. Instead of sustaining a chain reaction, a subcritical reactor uses additional neutrons from an outside source. There are two general classes of such devices. One uses neutrons provided by a nuclear fusion machine, a concept known as a fusion–fission hybrid. The other uses neutrons created through spallation of heavy nuclei by charged particles such as protons accelerated by a particle accelerator, a concept known as an accelerator-driven system (ADS) or accelerator-driven sub-critical reactor.
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