Prompt Acceleration of a Short-Lifetime Low-Energy Muon Beam

TL;DR

This paper proposes a novel prompt acceleration method for low-energy muon beams using beam-driven plasma wakefield, significantly increasing energy within a short time and improving muon beam properties for advanced physics experiments.

Contribution

It introduces a new prompt acceleration scheme for low-energy muons with high efficiency using plasma wakefield, enabling practical muon applications beyond current limitations.

Findings

Muon beam accelerated from 275 MeV to over 10 GeV in 22.5 ps

Energy transfer efficiency from electron beam to muons reaches 20%

Longitudinal and energy distribution of muons are compressed

Abstract

An energetic muon beam is an attractive key to unlock new physics beyond the Standard Model: the lepton flavor violation or the anomalous magnetic moment, and also is a competitive candidate for the expected neutrino factory. Lots of the muon scientific applications are limited by low flux cosmic-ray muons, low energy muon sources or extremely expensive muon accelerators. An prompt acceleration of the low-energy muon beam is found in the beam-driven plasma wakefield up to $\mathrm{TV/m}$. The muon beam is accelerated from $275\mathrm{MeV}$ to more than $10\mathrm{GeV}$ within $22.5\mathrm{ps}$. Choosing the injection time of the muon beam in a proper range, the longitudinal spatial distribution and the energy distribution of the accelerated muon beam are compressed. The efficiency of the energy transfer from the driven electron beam to the muon beam can reach $20\%$. The prompt acceleration scheme is a promising avenue to bring the expected neutrino factory and the muon collider into reality and to catch new physics beyond the Standard Model.