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MuX

MuX is a beta-instrument that, in collaboration with Japanese colleagues, was installed in 2014. Since then, it has been used to non-destructively determine the depth-sensitive elemental composition in a wide variety of materials, including precious cultural heritage artefacts, biomaterials and energy storage devices.

A statue surrounded by detectors
Elemental analysis
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Instrument scientist

To find out more about each team member, click the + symbol.

Team member

Adrian Hillier
Team member

Sayani Biswas

Instrument scientist

We support a wide range of science on this instrument and will put you in touch with the Muon Group team member who is best able to support your experiment.

Technical information

The MuX beta-instrument is installed in Port 4 beamline of the RIKEN-RAL facility at ISIS. This beamline can be tuned for a range of negative muon momenta, from 20 MeV/c to 90 MeV/c. This allows the muon implantation depth to be varied from few tens of micrometres to a few centimetres, depending on the density of the sample under question. For example, in water, the implantation depth range is 0.4 to 100 mm and for Cu, it is 0.05 to 11.2 mm.  

The current setup consists of four ORTEC HighPurity Germanium (HPGe) detectors, placed on a flat horizontal table. Two of the HPGe detectors have an energy range from 0.1 to 10 MeV, while the other two have an energy range of 3 keV to 10 MeV. The sample is placed in air in front of the beam and aligned using a laser system. 

Related resources

Elemental Visualisation and Analysis (EVA): ISISMuon/EVA: Data analysis software for MuX 

Instrument highlights

Our facility supports a broad research programme that generates impact on a national and global scale. Browse through some of the recent research conducted using the MuX beamline.
PhD student Matilda Rhodes is working on lithium ore materials, using muons to examine their structure
Using muons to test lithium-ore materials to improve the understanding of their structure for future battery technologies
Two silver coins from the Middle Ages
Muons could shed light on the economy of the Early Middle Ages
Array of charged particle detectors with the muon beam hole seen at the centre​​​​​
Evaluating charged particle spectra could reduce errors in designing essential computing and memory devices
An image featuring the Earth in the bottom right-hand corner, and increasingly zoomed-in components of meteorite rock on the left-hand side.
Meteorite or meteor-wrong?

Recent publications

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Instrument reference

All publications and datasets based on experiments using MuX should cite that the data is collected by DOI: 10.5286/isis.instrument.7466. Experiment DOIs follow the format 10.5286/ISIS.E.RBXXXXXXX, where XXXXXXX is the 7-digit experiment (RB) number and these can be viewed via the Data Gateway.

Team member