MECO Design Development

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

Recognizing an opportunity to address new physics, a strong collaboration representing 20 institutions, has formed and is proposing funding for the project entitled "Rare Symmetry Violating Processes" (RSVP). RSVP represents an opportunity to empower the university community to make discoveries of extraordinary importance. The current scope of RSVP includes 130 scientists, about 60% from the United States, and the others from Canada, Switzerland, Italy, Japan, and Russia, along with an expected 100 graduate students and post-docs. Observation of muon to electron conversion by MECO would be the first evidence for a process that violates muon and electron type lepton number and that cannot be explained by the Standard Model of particle physics, extended to include massive neutrinos. It would be direct evidence for previously unknown physics processes involving new forces. This experiment is proposed to achieve a sensitivity 10,000 times that of current experiments.