The best-laid plans of MICE and muons did not go awry: Physicists at the International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment, or MICE, collaboration have achieved their yearslong goal of quickly sapping energy from muons.
老鼠和µ子最好的計劃並沒有出錯：國際µ子電離冷卻實驗(或稱mICES)的物理學家們已經實現了他們多年的目標，即迅速消耗µ子的能量。
Muons are fundamental particles that, like electrons, possess a negative charge, but they are more than 200 times as heavy.
µ子是基本粒子，像電子一樣具有負電荷，但它們的重量是電子的200多倍。
The results, reported in Nature on February 5, are the first demonstration of ionization cooling, a technique which could allow researchers to control muons for future collider applications.
這一結果發表在2月5日的“自然”雜誌上，這是電離冷卻的首次演示，這項技術可以讓研究人員控制µ子，以用於未來的對撞機應用。
The achievement “is epochal,” says Vladimir Shiltsev, a physicist at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Ill., who was not involved with the new work.
這一成就“具有劃時代意義”，伊利諾伊州巴達維亞費米國家加速器實驗室的物理學家弗拉基米爾·希爾採夫(Vladimir Shiltsev)說，他沒有參與這項新工作。
“It basically opens a new venue for research.”
“它基本上為研究開闢了一個新的場所。”
Currently, particle physicists are at a crossroads.
目前，粒子物理學家正處於十字路口。
Existing particle colliders such as the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN near Geneva, have not generated the leads to new physics that they were expected to produce.
現有的粒子對撞機，例如日內瓦附近歐洲核子研究中心的大型強子對撞機(LHC)，還沒有產生人們期望它們產生的新物理的線索。
Although the 2012 discovery of the Higgs boson at the LHC confirmed decades-old predictions about how fundamental particles get their mass, it left physicists the victims of their own success.
儘管2012年在LHC發現的希格斯玻色子證實了幾十年來關於基本粒子如何獲得質量的預測，但它讓物理學家成為他們自己成功的受害者。
What comes next? To reach higher, unexplored energies in which new phenomena could manifest, future particle colliders using conventional technology will have to get bigger and bigger—and much more expensive.
接下來是什麼？為了達到更高的、新現象可能出現的未被探索的能量，使用傳統技術的未來粒子對撞機將不得不變得越來越大-而且更加昂貴。
Last year a proposal for CERN’s Future Circular Collider—a 100-kilometer ring that would be nearly four times bigger than the LHC—was criticized for its estimated cost of more than $20 billion.
去年，歐洲核子研究組織(CERN)未來圓形對撞機-一個100公里長的環，幾乎是LHC的四倍大-的提案因其估計成本超過200億美元而受到批評。
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