Comment by TheOtherHobbes
7 hours ago
If it was possible to build a direct neutron accelerator/collider, I suspect we'd get some new physics pretty quickly.
Analysing hand-me-down neutron events from indirect collisions isn't quite as useful.
7 hours ago
If it was possible to build a direct neutron accelerator/collider, I suspect we'd get some new physics pretty quickly.
Analysing hand-me-down neutron events from indirect collisions isn't quite as useful.
At ISIS (Oxford neutron source)…
Spallation generation: High-energy protons (~800 MeV) hit a heavy target, releasing a wide spectrum of fast neutrons up to hundreds of MeV. These are then moderated down to useful energies for experiments.
It’s not the LHC, sure. But I don’t see any reason (apart from “why bother”) why they can’t do spallation in Geneva. OK maybe there’s a cooling problem…
Spallation is the easy part
But neutrons can't go around a tube being guided by magnetic fields
Well my point is that the energy of the spallation neutrons is monotonically related to the energy of the protons hitting the Tungsten target ... although somewhat lower. I would consider these 100s MeV partiles to be (quite) high energy in contrast to the thermal neutrons alluded to elsewhere. Sure the spallation is lossy, but the result is still pretty high. And the physics is somewhat different with neutron experiments vs. protons... iiuc
There absolutely are direct neutron experiments, but they are much lower energy and have a different focus, partly because neutrons being neutral means they’re very hard to accelerate.
There’s an ultra cold neutron source at Paul Scherrer that is used to measure if the neutron has an electric dipole moment. This is complementary to high energy experiments.
Neutrons are not that different from protons. The decay from neutrons to protons is pretty well understood, and there’s no reason to think that the nature of quark/gluon interactions in a neutron are significantly different from those in a proton. What kind of new physics are you imagining we’d get?
Of course more experimental data is a good thing, but in this case it doesn’t seem obvious that it would lead to anything really new.
Why do you say they're "pretty well understood" when there's been a long-standing unresolved discrepancy between lifetime measurement techniques?