MICE: The International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment: Phase Space Cooling Measurement

TL;DR

MICE is an experimental setup designed to measure ionization cooling of muon beams, demonstrating a 10% reduction in transverse emittance using liquid-hydrogen absorbers and RF cavities.

Contribution

This paper reports the first measurement of phase space cooling in a muon ionization cooling channel with high-precision instrumentation.

Findings

Achieved approximately 10% reduction in transverse emittance.

Demonstrated precise measurement techniques with 0.1% accuracy.

Validated the feasibility of muon cooling for future accelerators.

Abstract

MICE is an experiment with a section of an ionization cooling channel and a muon beam. The muons will be produced by the decay of pions from a target dipping into the ISIS proton beam at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). The channel includes liquid-hydrogen absorbers providing transverse and longitudinal momentum loss and high-gradient radiofrequency (RF) cavities for longitudinal reacceleration, all packed into a solenoidal magnetic channel. MICE will reduce the beam transverse emittance by about 10% for muon momenta between 140 and 240 MeV/c. Time-of-flight (TOF) counters, a threshold Cherenkov counter, and a calorimeter will identify background electrons and pions. Spectrometers before and after the cooling section will measure the beam transmission and input and output emittances with an absolute precision of 0.1%.