Bob Higgins wrote:
The descriptions in 5,8) below suggests that Holmlid's reaction produces a high muon flux that would escape the reactor. A high muon flux would be very similar to a high beta flux. First of all, it would seem that a flux of charged muons would be highly absorbed in the reactor walls.
Bob - Yes, this has been the obvious criticism in the past, but it has been addressed.
As I understand it, the muons which are detected*do not exist* until the meson, which is the progenitor particle, is many meters away. This makes the lack of containment of muons very simple to understand.
At one time muons were thought to exist as neutral instead of charged (see the reference Bob Cook sent, from 1957) but in fact, the observers at that time, due to poor instrumentation - were seeing neutral mesons, not muons.
As an example, a neutral Kaon decays to two muons one negative and one positive. However, the lifetime of the Kaon which is much shorter than the muon but still about ~10^-8 seconds means that on average 99+% of the particles are tens to hundreds of meters away before they decay to muons. Thus the reactor is transparent to the progenitor particle.
This is why Holmlid places a muon detector some distance away and then calculates the decay time. Thus he claims an extraordinarily high flux of muons which assumes that the detector is mapping out a small space on a large sphere. However, they are not usable any more than neutrinos are usable, since they start out as a neutral meson.
