Muon capture for the front end of a muon collider

TL;DR

This paper details the design of the muon capture front end for a muon collider, focusing on pion production, muon collection, bunch formation, cooling, and acceleration to enable high-energy collisions.

Contribution

It presents a novel design for the muon capture front end, adapting concepts from neutrino factory technology for collider applications.

Findings

Design effectively captures and cools muons from proton targets.

Bunch formation and energy alignment are achieved with RF cavities.

Initial design demonstrates feasibility for high-energy muon collider.

Abstract

We discuss the design of the muon capture front end for a \mu+-\mu- Collider. In the front end, a proton bunch on a target creates secondary pions that drift into a capture transport channel, decaying into muons. A sequence of rf cavities forms the resulting muon beams into strings of bunches of differing energies, aligns the bunches to (nearly) equal central energies, and initiates ionization cooling. The muons are then cooled and accelerated to high energy into a storage ring for high-energy high luminosity collisions. Our initial design is based on the somewhat similar front end of the International Design Study (IDS) neutrino factory.