Muons May Unlock Secrets of Teotihuacan

[Lionel]

Does the Pyramid of the Sun harbor any tombs? What might such tombs reveal about the society that two millennia ago built one of Mesoamerica's largest pyramids? In an experiment à la Luis Alvarez, who in the late 1960s concluded that there are no tombs in Egypt's Chephren pyramid, a collaboration of physicists and archaeologists hopes to glean answers to these questions by monitoring the passage of muons through the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan, 50 kilometers northeast of Mexico City. In the 1970s, nuclear physicist Arturo Menchaca and archaeologist Linda Manzanilla each independently discussed with Nobel prizewinner Alvarez the idea of conducting such an experiment in the Teotihuacan pyramid. "[Alvarez] wrote me that the muon approach could be applied wherever you have a hole underneath the pyramid," recalls Manzanilla. But it wasn't until three years ago, when another physics Nobelist, Leon Lederman, asked if the "Alvarez test" could be applied to the Pyramid of the Sun, that broader interest was sparked.

Manzanilla, a researcher at the Institute of Anthropological Research at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), and Menchaca, who heads UNAM's Institute of Physics, teamed up to do the experiment.

View: Full Article | Source: Physics Today