Muon Cooling R&D for a Neutrino Factory and Muon Collider

University Of Mississippi, University MS

Investigators

Abstract

The University of Mississippi group is part of an international collaboration developing the techniques for muon ionization cooling?a critical step toward the construction of a muon collider or neutrino factory. This award is to provide support for the only postdoc to be engaged in this research effort towards the development, testing and confirmation of the techniques. The intellectual merit of this award is the development of a key technology, muon ionization cooling, for creating neutrino beams to explore neutrino oscillations and a muon collider to explore the energy frontier at 1.5 TeV or higher. The immediate goal is to investigate the operation of a 201 MHz radio frequency (RF) cavity in a high magnetic field at Fermilab in the MuCool Test Area. RF power and liquid helium are available there now and a 400 MeV proton beam is coming. The intent is to learn how to run a large RF cavity in a magnetic field while avoiding electrical breakdown. A cavity of this frequency is big enough to accept a large fraction of the muons coming from a primary proton target via pion decay. The RF cavities must be able to operate in magnetic fields, which is key both for neutrino factories and muon colliders. The group will also simulate muon cooling with an inverse cyclotron and to commission two high density aerogel (n=1.07 and 1.12) Cherenkov pi/ì discrimination detectors for the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) at the Rutherford Lab in the United Kingdom. The broader impacts of this award are as follows. Mississippi students and QuarkNet teachers will be involved and will use acoustic sensors to locate and characterize sparking (electrical breakdown) in the RF cavity. Development of muon cooling could lead to building a neutrino factory, discovering CP violation in the lepton sector, and explaining the baryon-antibaryon asymmetry in the universe. A neutrino beam from a Neutrino Factory might be aimed at a detector in the NSF?s Deep Underground Science and Engineering Laboratory (DUSEL) at Homestake. This would give the United States a first rate physics project not only for understanding the universe, but also for training students.