Muon

//ˈmjuːɒn// noun

noun ·Rare ·Advanced level

Definitions

Noun
  1. 1
    An unstable elementary particle in the lepton family, having similar properties to the electron but with a mass 207 times greater.

    "The μ-meson of Powell (called here muon) is instead a disintegration product of the pion, only weakly linked to the nucleons and therefore of little importance in the explanation of nuclear forces."

  2. 2
    an elementary particle with a negative charge and a half-life of 2 microsecond; decays to electron and neutrino and antineutrino wordnet

Synonyms

All synonyms
mu mesonmu-mesonnegative muon

Example

More examples

"Searching for those differences is one of the tasks for the people at the Compact Muon Solenoid, or CMS, one of four main experiment sites around the Large Hadron Collider at CERN."

Etymology

Contraction of the earlier term mu-meson; the particle has now been recategorised as a lepton. Coined by Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in 1951 in his book Elementary Particles.

Related phrases

anti-muonmuon neutrinoelementary particle

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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.