Muon Collider: Peering into the Heart of Mass express
The Higgs boson is like a conductor that gives mass to all other particles. Without it, electrons would be massless and atoms would fall apart. But how does the conductor interact with itself? That is the key question a future muon collider aims to answer.
The paper examines the MUSIC facility, designed for muon collisions at 10 TeV. Muons are heavy relatives of electrons, and their collisions produce very clean events. Over five years of operation, the collider would accumulate an integrated luminosity of 10 inverse attobarns (a measure of collision count), allowing measurement of Higgs boson production rates in different channels: decay to a pair of b-quarks, decay to two W bosons, and production of two Higgs bosons simultaneously.
The precision promised by the muon collider surpasses all other proposed future accelerators. If the measured self-coupling deviates from Standard Model predictions, it would point to new physics — possibly additional fields or particles affecting the mechanism of electroweak symmetry breaking.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2604.17514
This contribution discusses the physics potential of a future muon collider operating at a center-of-mass energy of $$\sqrt{s} = 10$$ TeV for precision studies in the Higgs sector. Using a detailed detector simulation that incorporates the dominant sources of machine-induced background, the expected sensitivity to key Higgs processes is evaluated. These include the measurement of production cross sections for $$H\to b\bar{b}$$, $$H\to WW^*$$, and double-Higgs production $$H\!H\to b\bar{b}b\bar{b}$$. A central focus of the study is the determination of the Higgs boson trilinear self-coupling, a critical parameter for understanding the structure of the Higgs potential and electroweak symmetry breaking. The analysis is based on the MUSIC multi-purpose detector concept, specifically optimized for the muon collider environment, and assumes an integrated luminosity of $$10$$ ab$$^{-1}$$ collected over five years. The results presented highlight the exceptional prospects of a multi-TeV muon collider for exploring the Higgs potential with a level of precision unattainable by any other proposed future collider within a comparable timeframe.
Muons live only 2.2 microseconds, but in a collider they are accelerated to near light speed, and thanks to relativistic time dilation, they manage to make many turns before decaying.
In Liu Cixin's novel "The Three-Body Problem," aliens use subatomic particles for ultra-precise experiments — a muon collider would similarly require exquisite control over its beams.