arXiv subjects

Xueheng Zhang

Publications and source records attributed to Xueheng Zhang.

16 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Projected Sensitivity to Slow Muonphilic Dark Matter with Accelerator Muon Beams

The nature of dark matter (DM) remains one of the most enduring open questions in modern physics, and muonphilic DM has emerged as a promising scenario that complements traditional DM candidates. Following the recently established cosmic-ray muon scattering approach, we investigate the sensitivity for probing slow muonphilic DM with accelerator muon beams. A Geant4-based simulation framework is developed, incorporating the detector geometry from the PKMu muon tomography system and a dedicated elastic $μ$-DM scattering process. The projected sensitivity is found to be largely insensitive to both the beam energy and the transverse beam size when the beam is fully contained within the detector acceptance. For a benchmark beam intensity of $10^5/\rm{s}$, the simulated pure-muon beam surpasses the existing cosmic-ray limit of $1.61\times10^{-17}$ cm$^2$ at $m_{\rm DM}=1$ GeV within approximately 11 seconds. A realistic muon beam phase-space distribution based on simulations for the High Intensity heavy-ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) is also implemented, yielding projected limits that improve upon the cosmic-ray results by nearly two orders of magnitude in a one-day exposure. These results demonstrate that a beam-muon scattering experiment offers a robust and promising route toward significantly improved sensitivity to slow muonphilic DM.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

CANTON-$μ$ Proposal: A Next-Generation Muon $g-2$ Measurement at Sub-0.1 ppm Precision

We propose a next-generation precision measurement of the muon anomalous magnetic moment (muon g-2) at the High Intensity Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF) in Huizhou, China. We refer to this proposed experimental programme as CANTON-$μ$ (Coherent Anomalous magNetic momenT ObservatioN with muon). HIAF's intense, pulsed GeV-scale muon beams, particularly for negative muons, provide a promising basis for this programme. Building on two previously proposed storage-ring concepts, this work develops HIAF-specific experimental schemes that relax the conventional magic-momentum constraint and allow greater flexibility in the choice of beam momentum. We assess the expected muon intensity at HIAF and the corresponding statistical sensitivity. For each scheme, we identify its distinctive systematic effects, examine feasible control strategies, and propose quantitative systematic-uncertainty targets. Together, the statistical projections and systematic-uncertainty targets indicate prospective total precisions of 0.1 ppm in Phase-I, comparable to the current Fermilab precision, with the potential to reach the 0.05 ppm level in in Phase-II following the planned HIAF upgrade. At the ultimate projected precision, the measurement would provide a stringent test of the Standard Model and probe new physics at multi-TeV scales. A focus on negative-muon measurements would enable direct comparison with existing high-precision positive-muon results and strengthen tests of CPT symmetry in the muon sector within the Standard-Model Extension, with a projected sensitivity at the $10^{-24}$ GeV level, an order of magnitude beyond current limits.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

Low-energy Muon-Nucleon scattering experiment: LUNE (White Paper)

The HIAF will provide high-intensity, high-quality muon beams with momenta from 0.5 to 7.5 GeV/c. This energy range is uniquely suited for precision muon scattering, bridging the gap between low-energy electron facilities and future high-energy lepton-ion colliders. In particular, HIAF will enable precision measurements with both positive and negative muon beams over a broad kinematic range, complementing existing electron-scattering facilities such as JLab, EicC and EIC. Based on HIAF muon source, the LUNE Collaboration has been established to address several fundamental questions in nuclear and particle physics, including the proton charge radius puzzle, nucleon electromagnetic structure, and the dynamics of quantum electrodynamics and hadronic interactions. The program proceeds in two phases, from elastic scattering to nucleon structure and beyond-Standard-Model searches. The experiment is expected to determine the proton charge radius with a precision of approximately 1.0\% using elastic muon-proton scattering. It will also perform systematic measurements of the proton electromagnetic form factors with both $μ^+$ and $μ^-$ beams, enabling precise studies of two-photon exchange effects and stringent tests of quantum electrodynamics. Beyond elastic scattering, LUNE will investigate TMD, gravitational form factors, and nuclear charge radii, providing new insights into the 3D structure of nucleons and nuclei. The experiment will further address important topics including Coulomb-distortion corrections, nuclear medium effects, and possible signatures of physics beyond the Standard Model. This white paper presents the scientific motivation, detector concept, expected performance, and long-term strategy of LUNE.

hep-ex↗

arXiv2026

The muon Moonshot: Moon subsurface tomography with upward-going muons

We propose a novel muon Moonshot concept for lunar subsurface tomography based on upward-going muons originated from the lunar regolith. Unlike the Earth, the Moon lacks an atmosphere, leaving a dense regolith below and a near-vacuum environment above. Consequently, while most downward-going hadrons are absorbed before decaying, upward-going hadrons escaping the regolith can decay in flight, producing a significant source of lunar muons. These muons are detectable by instruments on the lunar surface or in near-lunar orbit. We perform Monte Carlo simulations to investigate their energy spectra, angular distributions, and integrated fluxes under various theoretical and detector configurations. The results indicate that the lunar muon flux is sensitive to detector altitude under a flat-terrain assumption, demonstrating its potential as a novel non-invasive probe of shallow subsurface voids. We also present case studies on the detection of underground cavities and water resources, with cavity-induced flux variations observable in less than two minutes and weaker water signals distinguishable after about 36 minutes of data collection with a $1~\mathrm{m^2}$ detector, and discuss potential implementations in future lunar missions.

astro-ph.EP↗

arXiv2026

Production of lepton-flavor-violating scalars through resonant positive-muon annihilation on atomic electrons

We investigate an invisible lepton-flavor-violating scalar $ϕ$ with exclusive $e-μ$ couplings and study its resonant production via $μ^+e^-\toϕ$ in fixed-target experiments. Since the effective center-of-mass energy is determined by the momentum of the initial-state bound electrons, atomic effects can significantly affect the resonance behavior. We therefore employ relativistic bound-state electron wave functions to calculate the production cross section and reveal a material-dependent broadening of the resonance lineshape. For the proposed HIAF experiment, fewer than one day of data taking ($6\times10^{10}$ MOT) can probe couplings at the $10^{-5}$ level at 90\% confidence level near resonance, demonstrating that high-intensity muon fixed-target experiments provide a powerful complementary probe of lepton-flavor violation.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2026

Improving Muon-Scattering Material Identification via Coarse Momentum Encoding and Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Cosmic-ray muon scattering has shown considerable potential for detecting nuclear materials and other dense contraband, but practical deployment remains challenging. A major difficulty arises from the coupling between material properties and muon momentum, since the broad natural momentum distribution influences the scattering angle and prevents unambiguous material identification. In this work, we propose a Coarse Momentum-Aware Domain Adaptation (CMADA) method to enable precise identification of materials. Instead of relying on high-precision momentum measurements, the proposed framework adopts coarse momentum binning combined with unsupervised domain adaptation to learn transferable scattering representations. In addition, a precision review mode based on averaging repeated samplings was proposed to further enhances identification performance. The coarse momentum binning strategy improves same-domain identification accuracy from 62.15% without momentum information to 89.52% with 5-bin momentum information, and further to 93.37% (precision review mode). Furthermore, the proposed unsupervised domain adaptation framework improves the cross-domain identification accuracy from 71.71% for the source-only baseline to 89.00% without requiring target domain labels.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2026

DREAMuS: Dark matter REsearch with Advanced Muon Source

We propose DREAMuS, a fixed-target experiment at the High Intensity Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF), to search for muon-philic dark matter mediated by light flavor-violating bosons. DREAMuS is designed to probe the parameter space of a muon-philic dark matter (DM) mediated by a light flavor-violating boson, specifically a vector $Z'$ (or a scalar $ϕ$) which is produced in muon-nucleus interactions and decays into dark matter particles with a distinctive detector signature. Precision tracking and time-of-flight measurements are used to suppress the Standard Model backgrounds. We find that DREAMuS can achieve competitive sensitivity in the GeV-scale muon-philic dark matter parameter space, reaching sensitivity to couplings at the $10^{-4}$, especially in the few-hundred-MeV region.In addition to a $μ^-$ run, we highlight the potential of a complementary $μ^+$ beam option, further improving sensitivity to dark matter below 200 $\mathrm{MeV}$ by an order of magnitude.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2026

U-Net Based Image Enhancement for Short-time Muon Scattering Tomography

Muon Scattering Tomography (MST) is a promising non-invasive inspection technique, yet the practical application of short-time MST is hindered by poor image quality due to limited muon flux. To address this limitation, we propose a U-Net-based framework trained on Point of Closest Approach (PoCA) images reconstructed with simulation MST data to enhance image quality. When applied to experimental MST data, the framework significantly improves image quality, increasing the Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) from 0.7232 to 0.9699 and decreasing the Learned Perceptual Image Patch Similarity (LPIPS) from 0.3604 to 0.0270. These results demonstrate that our method can effectively enhance low-statistics MST images, thereby paving the way for the practical deployment of short-time MST.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2025

Search for light Dark Sectors with GeV Muon Beams

Sub-GeV light dark matter often requires new light mediators, such as a dark $Z$ boson in the $L_μ- L_τ$ gauge theory. We study the search potential for such a $Z^\prime$ boson via the process $μe^- \to μe^- X$, with $X$ decaying invisibly, in a muon on-target experiment using a high-intensity 1-10 GeV muon beam from facilities such as HIAF-HIRIBL. Events are identified by the scattered muon and electron from the target using silicon strip detectors in a single-station telescope system. Backgrounds are suppressed through a trained boosted decision tree (BDT) classifier, and activity in downstream subdetectors remains low. This approach can probe a $Z^\prime$ boson in the 10 MeV mass range with improved sensitivity. Nearly three orders of magnitude improvement is achievable with a full multi-telescope station system employing a 160 GeV muon beam at CERN, such as in the MUonE experiment.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2025

Improving Muon Scattering Tomography Performance With A Muon Momentum Measurement Scheme

Muon imaging, especially muon scattering tomography (MST), has recently garnered significant attention. MST measures the magnitude of muon scattering angles inside an object, which depends not only on the material properties but also on the muon momentum. Due to the difficulty of simultaneous measurement of momentum, it was neglected and taken as a constant in multiple MST reconstruction algorithms. Recently, an experimental measurement scheme has emerged that is feasible in engineering, but it requires many layers of detectors to approach the true momentum. From this, we proposed both an algorithm to incorporating momentum into MST, and a scheme to determine the thresholds of Cherenkov detectors. This novel scheme, termed the "equi-percentage scheme", sets momentum thresholds for Cherenkov detector layers based on cosmic muon momentum distribution. Results showed our approach delivers noticeable enhancement in reconstructed image quality even with only two detector layers, reaching near-saturation performance with four layers. This study proves that momentum measurement significantly enhances short-duration MST, and that substantial improvement can be achieved with relatively coarse momentum measurement using 2-4 layers of Cherenkov detectors.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2025

The Feasibility Study of the GeV-Energy Muon Source Based on HIAF

Generating a mono-energetic, high-energy muon beam using accelerator facilities can be very attractive for many purposes, for example, improving muon tomography currently limited by the low flux and wide energy spread of cosmic ray muons, and searching for muon related new physics beyond the Standard Model. One potential accelerator facility is the High Intensity Heavy-Ion Accelerator Facility (HIAF), which is currently under construction in Huizhou City, China. Considering the projectile energy and beamline length, a high-intensity and GeV-energy muon flux could be produced and delivered by the High Energy Fragment Separator beamline of the HIAF facility. In this paper, the flux intensity and purity of muon beam based on HIAF are discussed in detail. For the $μ^+$ beam, the highest muon yield reaches $8.2 \times 10^6 ~ μ$/s with the purity of approximately $2\%$ at a momentum of 3.5 GeV/c; meanwhile, for the $μ^-$ beam, the maximum muon yield is 4.2 $\times 10^6 ~ μ$/s with the purity of around $20\%$ at a momentum of 1.5 GeV/c. The results also indicate that, for muon beams with an energy of several GeV, by applying a suitable purification strategy, we can get a muon beam with a purity of 100\% and an intensity of the order of $10^5 ~ μ$/s.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2025

Transfer learning empowers material Z classification with muon tomography

Cosmic-ray muon sources exhibit distinct scattering angle distributions when interacting with materials of different atomic numbers (Z values), facilitating the identification of various Z-class materials, particularly those radioactive high-Z nuclear elements. Most of the traditional identification methods are based on complex muon event reconstruction and trajectory fitting processes. Supervised machine learning methods offer some improvement but rely heavily on prior knowledge of target materials, significantly limiting their practical applicability in detecting concealed materials. For the first time, transfer learning is introduced into the field of muon tomography in this work. We propose two lightweight neural network models for fine-tuning and adversarial transfer learning, utilizing muon tomography data of bare materials to predict the Z-class of coated materials. By employing the inverse cumulative distribution function method, more accurate scattering angle distributions could be obtained from limited data, leading to an improvement by nearly 4\% in prediction accuracy compared with the traditional random sampling based training. When applied to coated materials with limited labeled or even unlabeled muon tomography data, the proposed method achieves an overall prediction accuracy exceeding 96\%, with high-Z materials reaching nearly 99\%. Simulation results indicate that transfer learning improves prediction accuracy by approximately 10\% compared to direct prediction without transfer. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of transfer learning in overcoming the physical challenges associated with limited labeled/unlabeled data, highlights the promising potential of transfer learning in the field of muon tomography.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2025

Probing and Knocking with Muons

We propose here a set of new methods involving probing and knocking with muons (PKMu). There is a wealth of rich physics to explore with GeV muon beams. Examples include but not limited to: muon scattering can occur at large angles, providing evidence of potential muon-philic dark matter or dark mediator candidates; muon-electron scattering can be used to detect new types of bosons associated with charged lepton flavor violation; precise measurements of GeV-scale muon-electron scattering can be employed to probe quantum correlations.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

Quantum state tomography with muons

Entanglement is a fundamental pillar of quantum mechanics. Probing quantum entanglement and testing Bell inequality with muons can be a significant leap forward, as muon is arguably the only massive elementary particle that can be manipulated and detected over a wide range of energies, e.g., from approximately 0.3 to $10^2$ GeV, corresponding to velocities from 0.94 to nearly the speed of light. In this work, we present a realistic proposal and a comprehensive study of quantum entanglement in a state composed of different-flavor fermions in muon-electron scattering. The polarization density matrix for the muon-electron system is derived using a kinematic approach within the relativistic quantum field theory framework. Entanglement in the resulting muon-electron qubit system and the violation of Bell inequalities can be observed with a high event rate. This paves the way for performing quantum tomography with muons.

hep-ph↗

arXiv2024

First Proof of Principle Experiment for Muon Production with Ultrashort High Intensity Laser

Muons, which play a crucial role in both fundamental and applied physics, have traditionally been generated through proton accelerators or from cosmic rays. With the advent of ultra-short high-intensity lasers capable of accelerating electrons to GeV levels, it has become possible to generate muons in laser laboratories. In this work, we show the first proof of principle experiment for novel muon production with an ultra-short, high-intensity laser device through GeV electron beam bombardment on a lead converter target. The muon physical signal is confirmed by measuring its lifetime which is the first clear demonstration of laser-produced muons. Geant4 simulations were employed to investigate the photo-production, electro-production, and Bethe-Heitler processes response for muon generation and their subsequent detection. The results show that the dominant contributions of muons are attributed to the photo-production/electro-production and a significant yield of muons up to 0.01 $μ$/$e^-$ out of the converter target could be achieved. This laser muon source features compact, ultra-short pulse and high flux. Moreover, its implementation in a small laser laboratory is relatively straightforward, significantly reducing the barriers to entry for research in areas such as muonic X-ray elemental analysis, muon spin spectroscopy and so on.

physics.acc-ph↗

arXiv2021

Improving the particle identification of radioactive isotope beams at the RIBLL2 separator

To improve the ability of particle identification of the RIBLL2 separator at the HIRFL-CSR complex, a new high-performance detector for measuring fragment starting time and position at the F1 dispersive plane has been constructed and installed, and a method for achieving precise B\r{ho} determination has been developed using the experimentally derived ion-optical transfer matrix elements from the measured position and ToF information. Using the high-performance detectors and the precise B\r{ho} determination method, the fragments produced by the fragmentation of 78Kr at 300 MeV/nucleon were identified clearly at the RIBLL2-ETF under full momentum acceptance. The atomic number Z resolution of σZ~0.19 and the mass-to-charge ratio A/Q resolution of σA/Q~5.8e-3 were obtained for the 75As33+ fragment. This great improvement will increase the collection efficiency of exotic nuclei, extend the range of nuclei of interest from the A<40 mass region up to the A~80 mass region, and promote the development of radioactive nuclear beam experiments at the RIBLL2 separator.

physics.ins-det↗