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We report on the design and commissioning of a new spectrometer for muon-spin relaxation/rotation studies installed at the Swiss Muon Source (SµS) of the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI, Switzerland). This new instrument is essentially a new design and replaces the old general-purpose surface-muon instrument (GPS) which has been for long the workhorse of the µSR user facility at PSI. By making use of muon and positron detectors made of plastic scintillators read out by silicon photomultipliers (SiPMs), a time resolution of the complete instrument of about 160 ps (standard deviation) could be achieved. In addition, the absence of light guides, which are needed in traditionally built µSR instrument to deliver the scintillation light to photomultiplier tubes located outside magnetic fields applied, allowed us to design a compact instrument with a detector set covering an increased solid angle compared to the old GPS.

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A shallow-to-deep instability of hydrogen defect centres in narrow-gap oxide semiconductors is revealed by a study of the electronic structure and electrical activity of their muonium counterparts, a methodology that we term ‘muonics’. In CdO, Ag2O and Cu2O, paramagnetic muonium centres show varying degrees of delocalization of the singly occupied orbital, their hyperfine constants spanning 4 orders of magnitude. PbO and RuO2, on the other hand, show only electronically diamagnetic muon states, mimicking those of interstitial protons. Muonium in CdO shows shallow-donor behaviour, dissociating between 50 and 150 K; the effective ionization energy of 0.1 eV is at some variance with the effective-mass model but illustrates the possibility of hydrogen doping, inducing n-type conductivity as in the wider-gap oxide, ZnO. For Ag2O, the principal donor level is deeper (0.25 eV) but ionization is nonetheless complete by room temperature. Striking examples of level-crossing and RF resonance spectroscopy reveal a more complex interplay of several metastable states in this case. In Cu2O, muonium has quasi-atomic character and is stable to 600 K, although the electron orbital is substantially more delocalized than in the trapped-atom states known in certain wide-gap dielectric oxides. Its eventual disappearance towards 900 K, with an effective ionization energy of 1 eV, defines an electrically active level near mid-gap in this material.

The MEG experiment took data at the Paul Scherrer Institute in the years 2009–2013 to test the violation of the lepton flavor conservation law, which originates from an accidental symmetry that the Standard Model of elementary particle physics has, and published the most stringent limit on the charged lepton flavor violating decay μ+→e+γ: BR(μ+→e+γ) <4.2×10−13 at 90% confidence level. The MEG detector has been upgraded in order to reach a sensitivity of 6×10−14. The basic principle of MEG II is to achieve the highest possible sensitivity using the full muon beam intensity at the Paul Scherrer Institute (7×107 muons/s) with an upgraded detector. The main improvements are better rate capability of all sub-detectors and improved resolutions while keeping the same detector concept. In this paper, we present the current status of the preparation, integration and commissioning of the MEG II detector in the recent engineering runs.