I have recently been giving thought to the idea of muon catalyzed fusion, specifically for the purpose of using it in a story concept. I would normally propose this kind of question to the world-building exchange, but my question is of a much more technical nature that I felt would attract better answers here. If it is out of scope, I have no issue with it being closed.
As I understand it, muon catalyzed fusion showed great promise as a way to achieve cheap fusion in terms of energy input. It almost works, but I believe there are two problems we haven't solved: either cheaply producing more muons, or increasing the likelihood that those muons will interact with the fuel source and produce fusion events.
I read various articles about the anomalous magnetic moment of the muon, and there are new experimental and theoretical results, one showing more accurate measurement of the anomaly, and theoretical predictions that align it more with the existing standard model.
If it eventually is shown that the anomaly is real, in my understanding this would lead to the necessity of new particles and/or fields outside the current standard model.
My question is whether the existence of a new field or particle could, at least mathematically, lead to some way of more easily producing muons, if we could find some way to manipulate the field. I'm not asking whether this is possible, but only if it is even anything more than an intuitive leap I have made. For example, the existence and our understanding of the electromagnetic field gives rise to an enormous number of possibilities relating to effects used throughout our everyday lives and even chemistry, our body structure, etc.
I know this is vague, and possibly unanswerable, but could a new field give rise to some new method of manipulating muons, or is this and absurd and not even plausible due to my (admittedly) limited understanding of the actual mathematics behind quantum physics?
Best Answer
When cannonading ghosts, it's very hard to tell what you shot down... Theorists do speculate; but, counterintuitively, they have pretty stringent rules of how to do that, and your question is actually quantitative (!!).
For the muon magnetic moment anomaly, we know that could be smaller than one part per million.
This is freakishly small to afford "us" any game-changing control over any manipulative process whatsoever, and thereby break the bottlenecks in actualizing muon-catalyzed fusion, a process that relies on copious production of muons, very expensive energetically (too far from the aggressively estimated "breakeven").
Theorists enjoy such "what if" exercises (the way the pentagon plays with war games), but only to help them visualize the landscape and the orders of magnitude involved. They have concluded, long ago, if not stridently, that the idea is a dog...