International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment
The International Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (or MICE) is a high energy physics experiment at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, designed to demonstrate ionization cooling of muons. This is a process whereby the emittance of a beam is reduced in order to reduce the beam size, so that more muons can be accelerated in smaller aperture accelerators and with fewer focussing magnets. This might enable the construction of high intensity muon accelerators, for example for use as a Neutrino Factory or Muon Collider.
MICE will reduce the transverse emittance of a muon beam over a single 7 m cooling cell and measure that reduction. The original MICE design was based on a scheme outlined in Feasibility Study II., it was revised significantly in 2014. Pions will be produced from a target in the ISIS neutron source and transported along a beamline where most will decay to muons before entering MICE. Cooling is tested with lithium hydride (LiH) crystals or liquid hydrogen (LH2) cells, magnets are used to focus and analyze the muon beam. MICE will measure cooling performance over a range of beam momenta between about 150 and 250 MeV/c.
The MICE muon beamline provides a low intensity muon beam for MICE. Pions will be transported from a target dipping into the fringe of the ISIS proton beam, through a pion decay channel, into a muon transport line and then into MICE. For efficient use of muons it is desirable to have a reasonably good match between the transport beamline and the cooling channel, with selection performed in analysis. Also, the beamline must suppress non-muon events from entering the cooling channel. A beam rate of a few hundred muons per second is expected.
MICE combines systems to identify, track, steer and cool muons.
To reject background from pions and electrons, Cerenkov detectors and time of flight detectors are the outermost components of the experiment. A calorimeter at the end distinguishes electrons from muons.
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