The design of the time-of-flight system for MICE

TL;DR

The paper details the design of a high-precision time-of-flight system for MICE, enabling accurate muon beam measurements in challenging experimental conditions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel time-of-flight system with sub-70 ps resolution suitable for high-rate, noisy environments in muon cooling experiments.

Findings

Achieved timing resolution better than 70 ps per plane

Successfully operated in high-rate, magnetic, and RF noise environments

Enabled precise particle-by-particle emittance measurements

Abstract

The international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) will carry out a systematic investigation of ionization cooling of a muon beam. As the emittance measurement will be done on a particle-by-particle basis, a sophisticated beam instrumentation is needed to measure particle coordinates and timing vs RF. The MICE time-of-flight system will measure timings with a resolution better than 70 ps per plane, in a harsh environment due to high particle rates, fringe magnetic fields and electron backgrounds from RF dark noise.