MICE -- Absorber and focus coil safety working group design document: Preliminary design and assessments

A Neutrino Factory based on a muon storage ring is the ultimate tool for studies of neutrino oscillations, including possibly the discovery of leptonic CP violation. it is also the first step toward a muon collider. To develop a stored-muon-beam facility to serve as a Neutrino Factory, it is necessary to ''cool'' a muon beam (decrease its phase-space volume). The short lifetime of the muon, 2.2 {micro}s at rest, eliminates all currently demonstrated cooling techniques and requires that a new, heretofore untried, technique--ionization cooling--be employed. Although ionization cooling of muons has never been demonstrated in practice, it has been shown by end-to-end simulation and design studies to be an important factor both for the performance and for the cost of a Neutrino Factory. This motivates an international program of R and D, including an experimental demonstration at Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). The aims of the international Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment are: (1) 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; and (2) 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. The MICE collaboration has designed an experiment in which a section of an ionization cooling channel is exposed to a muon beam. This cooling channel assembles liquid-hydrogen absorbers providing energy loss and high-gradient radio frequency (RF) cavities to re-accelerate the particles, all tightly contained in a magnetic channel. It reduces the beam transverse emittance by > 10% for muon momenta between 140 and 240 MeV/c. The layout of the experiment is shown. They utilize one complete magnetic cell of the cooling channel, comprising three absorber-focus-coil (AFC) modules and two RF-coupling-coil (RFCC) modules. Spectrometers placed before and after the cooling section shown, perform the measurements of beam transmission and emittance reduction with an absolute precision of {+-} 0.1%. The detector solenoids each have separate coils (matching coils) to tailor the optics smoothly between the cooling channel and detector modules