Muons, Inc. (Muons) is a unique and formidable private-sector, high-energy accelerator physics firm. Muons has a staff of experienced and extremely talented accelerator scientists and engineers, and elementary-particle physicists. We collaborate closely with 9 National Laboratories and 7 Universities. Muons was formed in 2002 to design the next atom smasher, the Muon Collider, in order to help the U.S. regain the lead in the energy frontier by studying the most fundamental forces and constituents of matter. We have expanded from SBIR-STTR funded R&D into other topics of national and global interest, including development, design, and implementation of systems and components for discovery science, national security, medicine, energy, and environment.
Our Primary R&D Areas
- Accelerator Driven Subcritical Reactor (ADSR) technology, a nuclear-energy technology that is fuel agnostic, and can address society's energy needs in an intrinsically safe manner. The waste stream from an ADSR is much smaller (per Gigawatt-hour) and vastly easier to manage than that from a conventional reactor. See Mu*STAR below.
- Enabling technologies for a muon collider, potentially the next atom-smasher to follow CERN’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
- Accelerator technology and related systems, used in research as well as commercial applications.
Mu*STAR
Our Mu*STAR collaboration inspires confidence in what we can acomplish with Mu*STAR (our accelerator-driven subcritical reactor). Our team includes personnel from:
- Oak ridge National Laboratory
- Burns and McDonnel
- Virginia Tech
- Deep Isolation US LLC
- Pacific Northwest National Laboratory
- Texas A&M University
- Virginia Commonwealth University
- Brookhaven National Laboratory
- Thomas Jefferson National Accelerator Facility
Together we will complete the design of Mu*STAR, including a complete conceptual design report. We anticipate further developments, including constructing and operating a demonstration system in the early 2030s.