The $100 muon detector

A doctoral student and his adviser designed a tabletop particle detector they hope to make accessible to budding young engineering physicists. When Spencer Axani was an undergraduate physics student, his background in engineering led him to a creative pipe dream: a pocket-sized device that could count short-lived particles called muons all day. Muons, heavier versions of electrons, are around us all the time, a byproduct of the cosmic rays that shoot out from supernovae and other high-energy eve...