Scientists from the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence are involved in a major international research project searching for "new physics"
15 April 2025
The German Research Foundation (DFG) has extended its funding for the Mu3e experiment for another four years. The project, which is a collaboration of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Heidelberg University, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), will receive funding of EUR 5.6 million starting in May 2025. This extension of the DFG-funded Research Unit 5199 will enable the participating scientists to take further steps in the search for the violation of the lepton family number.
The Mu3e experiment, carried out at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen in Switzerland, is an international project which also involves researchers from Switzerland and the UK. The aim of the project is to observe a so-called lepton-flavor violating decay of a positive muon, in which the muon decays into two positrons and one electron. As this decay is not foreseen in the Standard Model of particle physics, the observation of this process would be a clear indication of new physics.
Following the end of the first funding period, the experiment is currently in the set-up and commissioning phase. Novel, extremely thin pixel sensors, so-called HV-MAPS, as well as fibers and tiles with scintillation properties are used for radiation detection, which make it possible to precisely detect very high decay rates. In the first phase of the experiment, a muon beam with an intensity of up to 100 million muons per second will be used. From 2027, the experiment will be further optimized with a new High-Intensity Muon Beamline to increase the particle rate to an extraordinary 10 quadrillion decays.
The DFG Research Unit "Searching for charged lepton flavor violation with the Mu3e experiment" (FOR 5199), consisting of scientists from Mainz, Heidelberg, and Karlsruhe, has already been funded by the German Research Foundation for the past four years. Following its successful evaluation, funding has now been extended for another four years. The continued support will allow for the completion of the first phase of the experiment as well as the commissioning, initial data acquisition and analysis, and preparations for the next project phase.
The Mainz-based team led by Professor Niklaus Berger from the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence has developed the data acquisition system and the power supply, and the group is now busy preparing the operation of the experiment and analyzing the first data. The team is also working on concepts for processing up to 20 times higher data rates in the future to meet the requirements of the next phases of the experiment.