What's the difference between a Muon and a neutrino?

[Warpspeed13]

What's the difference between a neutrino and a Muon? Will a neutrino induce fusion the same as a muon? Does muon induced fusion take place in the sun? Any help is greatly appreciated.

 

[Orodruin]

A neutrino is much lighter than a muon and does not carry electric charge. Therefore, it only interacts through the weak force and it could possibly be its own anti-particle. Just as there are three families of charged leptons (electon, muon, and tau), there are also three different neutrinos.

The fusion in the sun is induced by temperature and pressure, not by muons.

 

[Warpspeed13]

How are muons artificially created then?

 

[ChrisVer]

They are different particles.
No there are no muons at the sun because the energies are not enough.
The muons are created by the interactions of cosmic rays with the atmosphere, and that's also the reason why the atmospheric ones were the first to be discovered.
http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/particles/muonatm.html

 

[Orodruin]

No there are no muons at the sun because the energies are not enough.

This statement is not entirely accurate. Muons are created also in cosmic ray interactions with the solar corona just as they are created in the atmosphere of the earth. Of course, such muons will decay long before they could reach us and the only possible signal at the Earth would be the neutrino flux from such decays. In fact, this is one of the possible backgrounds for (indirect) dark matter searches at neutrino telescopes.

 

[jtbell]

How are muons artificially created then?

Here's an old article about a proposal for a muon storage ring, in which the muons come from pion decay. The pions in turn come from protons colliding with a target.

http://cerncourier.com/cws/article/cern/28043

You can also get muon-antimuon pairs in any particle collision with high enough energy, just like you can get electron-positron pairs, pion-antipion pairs, etc. This isn't very efficient because most particle-antiparticle pairs end up being pions because they're the lightest charged particles. (I've seen them called the "small change [coins] of particle physics.")

 

[ChrisVer]

This statement is not entirely accurate. Muons are created also in cosmic ray interactions with the solar corona just as they are created in the atmosphere of the earth. Of course, such muons will decay long before they could reach us and the only possible signal at the Earth would be the neutrino flux from such decays. In fact, this is one of the possible backgrounds for (indirect) dark matter searches at neutrino telescopes.

Well the reason why I made that statement, was because we don't expect high rate of muon neutrinos from the sun. If the sun could indeed produce muons, it would be also a source of muon neutrinos. But the temperature of the sun varies from ~6,000 K to 16,000,000K which isn't enough for muon creation (100MeV). Of course muons can be produced in the sun in the same way as they do in our atmosphere- because of other cosmic rays.

 

[Orodruin]

When talking about the sun producing muon neutrinos: the flavor flux of neutrinos from the sun actually contains a large proportion of muon neutrinos. In particular for neutrinos from boron-8, which have an energy (ca 10 MeV) such that they are (mostly) produced above the MSW resonance - but also at lower energies due to oscillations and mass eigenstate decoherence. Unfortunately, these energies are not high enough to create muons in a laboratory at the earth, but the effects can be observed by comparing neutral current interaction rates of solar neutrinos with those of the charged current and quasi elastic scattering reactions.