EPFL drives accelerator design for new Swiss muon research centre
The Muoniverse Collaboration brings together Swiss expertise to develop next generation muon accelerator technologies. © Muoniverse.
The Swiss Confederation has launched Muoniverse, a National Centre of Competence in Research (NCCR) to advance muon science. EPFL will play a leading role in developing innovative acceleration schemes for low-emittance muon beams, supporting the design of a future national muon facility.
Muons, heavy cousins of the electron, are elementary particles with a short lifetime of only a few microseconds and a highly sensitive magnetic moment. These unique properties make them powerful probes for fundamental physics, enabling precision tests of the Standard Model, studies of nuclear structure, and investigations of novel quantum materials such as superconductors and exotic magnets. In applied research, muons are also used in environmental science, energy research, and cultural heritage, providing non-destructive imaging and depth resolved elemental analysis of matter.
The Muoniverse NCCR brings together leading Swiss institutions from the natural, engineering, and heritage sciences to connect previously separate disciplines and fully exploit the potential of muon beams. Supported by major federal funding (NCCR), the initiative reinforces Switzerland’s leadership in muon science and lays the foundations for future large-scale research infrastructures. Building on national expertise in muon production, precision measurements, and accelerator technology, Muoniverse develops new tools and concepts for next-generation muon facilities.
Within this framework, Project T2 addresses a central challenge: how to accelerate low-emittance positive muon beams while preserving the exceptional beam quality required for high-precision experiments and imaging. The project is led at EPFL by Dr Tatiana Pieloni in the Laboratory of Particle Accelerator Physics (LPAP), headed by Prof Mike Seidel. The work will be carried out in close collaboration with Dr Alessandra Lombardi (CERN) and Prof Aldo Antognini (ETH Zurich / PSI).
Low-emittance muon beams are initially compressed at millimetre-level scales using advanced cooling techniques. For practical applications, these beams must be accelerated to higher energies up to several MeV while strong focusing schemes reduce transverse dimensions to sub-millimetre beam spots, essential for exceptional spatial resolution in fundamental physics and high-resolution imaging. Achieving this is particularly demanding: with a lifetime of only about 2.2 µs, muons require ultra-fast, highly efficient acceleration while preserving beam quality.
Project T2 develops conceptual and technical designs to accelerate µ+ from roughly 10 keV (microbeam extraction) to several MeV. The EPFL team is extending and adapting beam-dynamics tools for muon acceleration studies, enabling realistic simulations of the full low-energy acceleration chain. Different acceleration schemes and technologies will be evaluated and compared in terms of performance, beam-quality preservation, and achievable energy. One scheme under investigation uses Radio-Frequency Quadrupole (RFQ) technology (Fig. 1), a compact and highly efficient accelerator capable of both accelerating and focusing low-energy beams in a single structure.
Designing an acceleration system that is simultaneously fast, efficient, and capable of delivering submillimetre beam spots represents a frontier challenge in modern accelerator physics. Project T2 contributes directly to the broader mission of Muoniverse: to establish the scientific and technological foundations for the next era of muon-based research, and to expand Switzerland’s use of muons across fundamental physics, materials science, energy, environmental, and cultural heritage applications.