Besides IIT, the consortium includes The University of Chicago, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Northwestern University and Northern Illinois University. Daniel Kaplan is the lead scientist in this endeavor. An intriguing possibility is creating a neutrino factory . Fermilab could become the major supplier of this little understood particle. We could aim neutrinos at detectors in California, New Mexico or New York.
Muons have an average lifetime of only two microseconds before decaying into neutrinos.
Storing muons is possible. But the hardest part is funneling them into an accelerator to get them up to high energy. We're working on that now to provide a viable future for Fermilab.