• V.C. Palladino
  INFN-Napoli, Napoli
• L. Coney
  UCR, Riverside, California

Funding: World Wide Collaboration of a large fraction of the international agencies.

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. By April 2009 it is expected that the beam and first set of detectors will have been commissioned, and a first measurement of input beam emittance may be reported. Along with the plan of measurements of emittance and cooling that will follow in the second half of 2009 and in 2010.

• L. Coney
  UCR, Riverside, California

The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) is being built at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) to test ionization cooling of a muon beam. Successful demonstration of cooling is a necessary step along the path toward creating future high intensity muon beams in either a neutrino factory or muon collider. MICE will reduce the transverse emittance of the beam by 10%, and spectrometers using particle physics techniques will measure the emittance reduction with an absolute precision of 0.1%. This measurement will be done with scintillating fiber tracking detectors nested inside solenoid magnets on either side of the cooling channel. Each fiber tracker contains five stations with 3 layers of fibers rotated 120 degrees with respect to each other, thereby allowing reconstruction of hit points along the path of the muons. Light is carried from the active fiber volume by clear waveguide fibers where it is detected using VLPCs (Visible Light Photon Counters). The details of the tracker commissioning using cosmic rays will be discussed in addition to the status and performance of the readout electronics*.

*Submitted on behalf of the MICE collaboration.