Scientists from the PRISMA+ Cluster of Excellence are involved in a major international research project searching for "new physics"
15 April 2025
The German Research Foundation (DFG) has extended its funding for the Mu3e experiment for another four years. The project, which is a collaboration of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz (JGU), Heidelberg University, and the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), will receive funding of EUR 5.6 million starting in May 2025. This extension of the DFG-funded Research Unit 5199 will enable the participating scientists to take further steps in the search for the violation of the lepton family number.
The Mu3e experiment, carried out at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI) in Villigen in Switzerland, is an international project which also involves researchers from Switzerland and the UK. The aim of the project is to observe a so-called lepton-flavor violating decay of a positive muon, in which the muon decays into two positrons and one electron. As this decay is not foreseen in the Standard Model of particle physics, the observation of this process would be a clear indication of new physics.