Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun The negatively charged lepton that belongs to the second generation of elementary fermions and has a mass 207 times that of an electron and a mean lifetime of 2.2 × 10−6 second.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun An unstable elementary particle in the lepton family, having similar properties to the electron but with a mass 209 times greater.

from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.

  • noun an elementary particle with a negative charge and a half-life of 2 microsecond; decays to electron and neutrino and antineutrino

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[Earlier mu meson (from the use of the Greek letter mu, the equivalent of the Roman letter m of MESON, to distinguish it from other mesons subsequently discovered, the class of particles to which it was formerly thought to belong).]

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License

Contraction of mu-meson (the particle has now been recategorised as a lepton).

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Examples

  • It was then realized that the particle found by Anderson could not be the meson of strong interactions, since it interacted far too little with matter, and it was then shown that this particle, now called the muon, is a heavy cousin of the electron.

    Forces 2001

  • A muon from a neutrino interaction in the AMANDA neutrino telescope at the South Pole.

    High Energy Neutrinos from Cosmos 2005

  • The muon is about 207 times heavier (106 MeV/c2) and belongs to the second family.

    Additional background material on the Nobel Prize in Physics 1995 1995

  • The muon is a relatively heavy, charged elementary particle which was discovered in cosmic radiation during the 1930s.

    Press Release: The 1988 Nobel Prize in Physics 1988

  • Thus, in the mass range up to 1.4 GeV/c2, the electron and the muon were the only charged leptons.

    Additional background material on the Nobel Prize in Physics 1995 1995

  • In theory, during the trip, which takes a few milliseconds, some of the neutrinos should shape-shift from a variety known as muon neutrinos to tau neutrinos.

    NYT > Home Page By DENNIS OVERBYE 2011

  • In theory, during the trip, which takes a few milliseconds, some of the neutrinos should shape-shift from a variety known as muon neutrinos to tau neutrinos.

    NYT > Home Page By DENNIS OVERBYE 2011

  • The muon is a heavier, less stable version of the electron, and it's produced in many of the collisions that occur in particle colliders like the LHC and Tevatron.

    Ars Technica John Timmer 2011

  • Very occasionally, however, a neutrino collides into an atom, producing from the wreckage another particle-known as a muon-that

    SEEDMAGAZINE.COM kloc@seedmediagroup.com 2010

  • Very rarely a neutrino will strike an atom, producing another particle called a muon and a shockwave, which results in a burst of blue light - which the sensors will record.

    Telegraph.co.uk - Telegraph online, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph 2010

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