Concepts for a Muon Accelerator Front-End

TL;DR

This paper proposes a muon front-end scheme involving pion production, RF bunching, and ionization cooling, supported by simulations to optimize parameters and reduce unwanted particle activation.

Contribution

It introduces a novel muon capture front-end design integrating pion production, RF bunching, ionization cooling, and particle removal, with performance evaluation through simulations.

Findings

Effective muon bunching and cooling demonstrated in simulations

Sensitivity analysis identifies key parameters affecting performance

Chicane system reduces secondary particle activation

Abstract

We present a muon capture front-end scheme for muon based applications. In this Front-End design, a proton bunch strikes a target and creates secondary pions that drift into a capture channel, decaying into muons. A series of rf cavities forms the resulting muon beams into a series of bunches of differerent energies, aligns the bunches to equal central energies, and initiates ionization cooling. We also discuss the design of a chicane system for the removal of unwanted secondary particles from the muon capture region and thus reduce activation of the machine. With the aid of numerical simulations we evaluate the performance of this Front-End scheme as well as study its sensitivity against key parameters such as the type of target, the number of rf cavities and the gas pressure of the channel.