• A. Alekou
  Imperial College of Science and Technology, Department of Physics, London

Muon ionization cooling provides the only practical solution to prepare high brilliance beams necessary for a neutrino factory or muon colliders. The muon ionization cooling experiment (MICE)* is under development at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (UK). It comprises a dedicated beam line to generate a range of input emittance and momentum, with time-of-flight and Cherenkov detectors to ensure a pure muon beam. A first measurement of emittance is performed in the upstream magnetic spectrometer with a scintillating fiber tracker. A cooling cell will then follow, alternating energy loss in liquid hydrogen and RF acceleration. A second spectrometer identical to the first one and a particle identification system provide a measurement of the outgoing emittance. In May 2010 it is expected that the beam and most detectors will be commissioned and the time of the first measurement of input beam emittance closely approaching. The plan of steps of measurements of emittance and cooling, that will follow in the rest of 2010 and later, will be reported.

This abstract is submitted by the chear of the MICE speaker bureau. A member of the collaboration will be soon identified to present the poster and added a co-author.

• C.T. Rogers
  STFC/RAL/ASTeC, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon
• A. Alekou
  Imperial College of Science and Technology, Department of Physics, London
• M. Martini, G. Prior
  CERN, Geneva
• D.V. Neuffer
  Fermilab, Batavia
• D. Stratakis
  BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York
• C. Y. Yoshikawa
  Muons, Inc, Batavia
• M.S. Zisman
  LBNL, Berkeley, California

We discuss alternative designs of the muon capture front end of the Neutrino Factory International Design Study (IDS). In the front end, a proton bunch on a target creates secondary pions that drift into a capture 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. This design is affected by limitations on accelerating gradients within magnetic fields. The effects of gradient limitations are explored, and mitigation strategies are presented.

• A. Alekou, J. Pasternak
  Imperial College of Science and Technology, Department of Physics, London
• C.T. Rogers
  STFC/RAL/ASTeC, Chilton, Didcot, Oxon

The Neutrino Factory is a planned particle accelerator complex that will produce an intense, focused neutrino beam, using neutrinos from muon decay. Such high neutrino intensities can only be achieved by reducing the muon beam emittance using an ionization cooling system. The G4MICE software is used to study the performance of various cooling cell configurations. A comparison is drawn between the cooling in the FS2 cells, the baseline Neutrino Factory and doublet cells. The beam dynamics in each of cooling channels are presented. The lattices are compared with respect to the equilibrium emittance, muon transmission, acceptance and evolution of emittance along the channel. Conclusions for a possible optimisation of the future muon cooling channel of the Neutrino Factory are presented.