Physics and Astronomy Colloquium

The muon, a heavy cousin of the electron, was discovered in 1936. Since
that time they have only ever been observed to do one of two things: 1)
scatter or 2) decay into final states that include a combination of
charged leptons and neutrinos. A new experiment at Fermilab - the Mu2e
experiment - is going to look for a third thing: a muon trapped in atomic
orbit that interacts with the nucleus to produce an electron and nothing
else. This is a process that's predicted to occur very very rarely, maybe
once every 10^15 decays,(or less!). But this very rare decay will probe
new physics mass scales up to 10,000 TeV/c^2 and may hold the key to
understanding physics at its most fundamental level. The Mu2e experiment
is an ambitious endeavor whose goal is to observe this very rare
interaction for the first time - a discovery that could help reveal a new
paradigm of particle physics.