Design, Installation, and Initial Commissioning of the MTA Beamline

TL;DR

This paper details the design, installation, and commissioning of the MuCool beamline at Fermilab, enabling advanced muon cooling experiments with high-intensity proton beams and supporting the development of muon facility technologies.

Contribution

It introduces a new beamline design for muon cooling experiments, accommodating high-intensity beams and integrating advanced measurement and cryogenic systems.

Findings

Successful installation and commissioning of the beamline.

Capability to support high-power beam tests for muon cooling.

Enhanced precision in beam parameter measurements.

Abstract

A new experimental area designed to develop, test and verify muon ionization cooling apparatus using the 400-MeV Fermilab Linac proton beam has been fully installed and is presently being commissioned. Initially, this area was used for cryogenic tests of liquid-hydrogen absorbers for the MUCOOL R&D program and, now, for high-power beam tests of absorbers, high-gradient rf cavities in the presence of magnetic fields (including gas-filled cavities), and other prototype muon-cooling apparatus. The experimental scenarios being developed for muon facilities involve collection, capture, and cooling of large-emittance, high-intensity muon beams--~10**13 muons, so that conclusive tests of the apparatus require full Linac beam, which is 1.6 x 10**13 p/pulse. To support the muon cooling facility, this new primary beamline extracts and transports beam directly from the Linac to the test facility. The design concept for the MuCool facility is taken from an earlier proposal, but modifications were necessary to accommodate high-intensity beam, cryogenics, and the increased scale of the cooling experiments. Further, the different mode of operation to provide precision line incorporates a specialized section and utilizes a measurements of Linac beam parameters. This paper reports on the technical details of the MuCool beamline for both modes.