Mu2e influenced by Vladimir Lobashev
Timeline
Prior work
Physicists have been searching for flavor violation since the 1940s. Flavor violation among neutrinos was proven in 1998 at the Super-Kamiokande experiment in Japan.In 1989, Russian physicists Vladimir Lobashev and Rashid Djilkibaev proposed an experiment to search for lepton flavor violation. The experiment, called MELC, operated from 1992 to 1995 at the Moscow Meson Factory at the Institute for Nuclear Research in Russia, before being shut down due to the political and economic crises of the time.In 1997, American physicist William Molzon proposed a similar experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory. Research and development on the MECO experiment began in 2001, but funding was pulled in 2005.