Talk:Muon capture

Can positive muons decay with muon capture in any way? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.235.50.255 (talk) 10:04, 17 December 2011 (UTC)

Negative muons can form muonic atoms in which the muon replaces an electron (as in muon-catalysed fusion), which allows them to interact with the nucleus for a longer period of time than in a collision. Both positive and negative muons can undergo collisions with nuclei, but positive muons can't form muonic atoms with normal matter (but can with antimatter). Therefore the reaction
μ⁺
 + 
n
 → 
ν
_μ + 
p
occurs at lower rates. This might be referred as to muon-induced decay rather than muon capture. Lavateraguy (talk) 16:31, 31 January 2015 (UTC)

Is the Feynman diagram not depicting antimuon emission rather than muon capture? Oscar Simpson (talk) 19:50, 27 June 2017 (UTC)

How can muon transmutation be controled?

According to the article on muons they are very penetrative. If they could be produced in quantities large enough for transmutation of macroscopic amounts of nuclear waste, how could one control that they react with the waste as supposed and not with everything else in the surrounding making more radioactive isotopes rather than reducing the amount of radioactivity. Also, would muon transmutation be applied to processed or unprocessed waste? For what isotopes would muon transmutation be beneficial, and how would other radioactive and stable isotopes in the waste react?150.227.15.253 (talk) 20:41, 7 February 2022 (UTC)

All those things are analogous for neutron induced transmutation and the proposed solutions in both cases are similar: Produce as (chemically and if need be isotopically) pure a target as you can, provide shielding that either does not do too many harmful things or can be safely disposed or discarded. So, as so often, the problem is hard but not unsolvable and the devil lies in the detail... Hobbitschuster (talk) 15:28, 8 February 2022 (UTC)