Eur. Phys. J. C (2013) 73: 2582
https://doi.org/10.1140/epjc/s10052-013-2582-8

Regular Article - Experimental Physics

Characterisation of the muon beams for the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment

¹ Department of Atomic Physics, St. Kliment Ohridski University of Sofia, Sofia, Bulgaria
² Dipartimento di Fisica G. Occhialini, Sezione INFN Milano Bicocca, Milano, Italy
³ Sezione INFN Napoli and Dipartimento di Fisica, Università Federico II, Complesso Universitario di Monte S. Angelo, Napoli, Italy
⁴ Sezione INFN Pavia and Dipartimento di Fisica Nucleare e Teorica, Pavia, Italy
⁵ Sezione INFN Roma Tre e Dipartimento di Fisica, Roma, Italy
⁶ Graduate School of Science, Department of Physics, Osaka University, Toyonaka, Osaka, Japan
⁷ High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), Institute of Particle and Nuclear Studies, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan
⁸ NIKHEF, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
⁹ CERN, Geneva, Switzerland
¹⁰ DPNC, Section de Physique, Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland
¹¹ STFC Daresbury Laboratory, Daresbury, Cheshire, UK
¹² STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Harwell Oxford, Didcot, UK
¹³ School of Physics and Astronomy, The University of Glasgow, Kelvin Building, Glasgow, UK
¹⁴ Department of Physics, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK
¹⁵ Department of Physics, Blackett Laboratory, Imperial College London, London, UK
¹⁶ Department of Physics, University of Oxford, Denys Wilkinson Building, Oxford, UK
¹⁷ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
¹⁸ Department of Physics, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK
¹⁹ Department of Physics, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK
²⁰ Brunel University, Uxbridge, UK
²¹ Fermilab, Batavia, IL, USA
²² Muons, Inc., Batavia, IL, USA
²³ Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA
²⁴ Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL, USA
²⁵ Enrico Fermi Institute, University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA
²⁶ University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA
²⁷ Department of Physics and Astronomy, University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA, USA
²⁸ University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, USA
²⁹ University of California, Riverside, CA, USA
³⁰ Brookhaven National Laboratory, Upton, NY, USA

^* e-mail: v.blackmore1@physics.ox.ac.uk

Received: 7 June 2013
Revised: 27 August 2013
Published online: 1 October 2013

Abstract

A novel single-particle technique to measure emittance has been developed and used to characterise seventeen different muon beams for the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE). The muon beams, whose mean momenta vary from 171 to 281 MeV/c, have emittances of approximately 1.2–2.3 π mm-rad horizontally and 0.6–1.0 π mm-rad vertically, a horizontal dispersion of 90–190 mm and momentum spreads of about 25 MeV/c. There is reasonable agreement between the measured parameters of the beams and the results of simulations. The beams are found to meet the requirements of MICE.