Technical Challenges and Scientific Payoffs of Muon BeamAccelerators for Particle Physics

Historically, progress in particle physics has largely beendetermined by development of more capable particle accelerators. Thistrend continues today with the recent advent of high-luminosityelectron-positron colliders at KEK and SLAC operating as "B factories,"the imminent commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN, and theworldwide development effort toward the International Linear Collider.Looking to the future, one of the most promising approaches is thedevelopment of muon-beam accelerators. Such machines have very highscientific potential, and would substantially advance thestate-of-the-art in accelerator design. A 20-50 GeV muon storage ringcould serve as a copious source of well-characterized electron neutrinosor antineutrinos (a Neutrino Factory), providing beams aimed at detectorslocated 3000-7500 km from the ring. Such long baseline experiments areexpected to be able to observe and characterize the phenomenon ofcharge-conjugation-parity (CP) violation in the lepton sector, and thusprovide an answer to one of the most fundamental questions in science,namely, why the matter-dominated universe in which we reside exists atall. By accelerating muons to even higher energies of several TeV, we canenvision a Muon Collider. In contrast with composite particles likeprotons, muons are point particles. This means that the full collisionenergy is available to create new particles. A Muon Collider has roughlyten times the energy reach of a proton collider at the same collisionenergy, and has a much smaller footprint. Indeed, an energy frontier MuonCollider could fit on the site of an existing laboratory, such asFermilab or BNL. The challenges of muon-beam accelerators are related tothe facts that i) muons are produced as a tertiary beam, with very large6D phase space, and ii) muons are unstable, with a lifetime at rest ofonly 2 microseconds. How these challenges are accommodated in theaccelerator design will be described. Both a Neutrino Factory and a MuonCollider require large numbers of challenging superconducting magnets,including large aperture solenoids, closely spaced solenoids withopposing fields, shielded solenoids, very high field (~;40-50 T)solenoids, and storage ring magnets with a room-temperature midplanesection. Uses for the various magnets will be outlined, along withR&D plans to develop these and other required components of suchmachines