STFC and Fermilab, LBNL, BNL and others
The international Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE) is one of the crucial
R&D experiments required to demonstrate the feasibility of a neutrino factory or
of a muon collider. The initial step in this project is to build the experiment
and MICE is now under construction at the ISIS facility at the STFC Rutherford Appleton
Laboratory.
The research
A neutrino factory is a facility providing an intense, well defined, high energy
beam of electron (anti-) neutrinos by exploiting the decay of muons in a storage
ring. MICE is an essential step in accelerator R&D towards the realisation of such
a neutrino factory. The neutrino factory is a completely new type of accelerator
and offers many new challenges including, from the point of view of accelerator
physics, ionisation cooling.
The project aims to show that it is possible to design, engineer and build a
section of cooling channel capable of giving the desired performance for a neutrino
factory. It also aims to place it in a muon beam and measure its performance in
various modes of operation and beam conditions, thereby investigating the limits
and practicality of cooling. These goals will be achieved by constructing a section
of a muon cooling channel and making precision single-particle measurements of the
emittance of a muon beam at the entrance and exit of the channel.
The project
The challenge of MICE requires close collaboration between accelerator and experimental
particle physics communities. MICE is an international collaboration comprising
some 140 physicists and engineers from Belgium, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Russia,
Switzerland, the UK and the US. In particular, this project has links in the USA
with Fermilab, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) and the Brookhaven
National Laboratory (BNL), as well as about a dozen US universities.
The collaboration is governed by a Collaboration Board where all the participating
institutes are represented. The Executive Board provides the daily management of
the MICE Collaboration regarding all its aspects including finances, detector construction
and, eventually, data analysis.
Quotation: For Professor Ken Long, the MICE-UK spokesman, this is a busy
time:
"This is an immensely exciting time: the MICE Muon Beam is due to be finished
by the end of January 2008; scientists from around the world are bringing equipment
for the MICE experiment which will be commissioned as soon as the beam is ready.
If MICE succeeds, the international MICE collaboration will have done much to
establish the Neutrino Factory as a viable option for the future of the field."
Links:
The MICE homepage