Demonstration of cooling by the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment

Bogomilov, M. et al. (2020) Demonstration of cooling by the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment. Nature, 578(7793), pp. 53-59. (doi: 10.1038/s41586-020-1958-9) (PMID:32025014) (PMCID:PMC7039811)

Abstract

The use of accelerated beams of electrons, protons or ions has furthered the development of nearly every scientific discipline. However, high-energy muon beams of equivalent quality have not yet been delivered. Muon beams can be created through the decay of pions produced by the interaction of a proton beam with a target. Such 'tertiary' beams have much lower brightness than those created by accelerating electrons, protons or ions. High-brightness muon beams comparable to those produced by state-of-the-art electron, proton and ion accelerators could facilitate the study of lepton-antilepton collisions at extremely high energies and provide well characterized neutrino beams1-6. Such muon beams could be realized using ionization cooling, which has been proposed to increase muon-beam brightness7,8. Here we report the realization of ionization cooling, which was confirmed by the observation of an increased number of low-amplitude muons after passage of the muon beam through an absorber, as well as an increase in the corresponding phase-space density. The simulated performance of the ionization cooling system is consistent with the measured data, validating designs of the ionization cooling channel in which the cooling process is repeated to produce a substantial cooling effect9-11. The results presented here are an important step towards achieving the muon-beam quality required to search for phenomena at energy scales beyond the reach of the Large Hadron Collider at a facility of equivalent or reduced footprint6.

• Item Type: Articles
• Additional Information: The work described here was made possible by grants from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK), the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (USA), the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy), the European Union under the European Union’s Framework Programme 7 (AIDA project, grant agreement number 262025; TIARA project, grant agreement number 261905; and EuCARD), the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science, the National Research Foundation of Korea (number NRF2016R1A5A1013277), the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia, the Institute of High Energy Physics/Chinese Academy of Sciences fund for collaboration between the People’s Republic of China and the USA, and the Swiss National Science Foundation in the framework of the SCOPES programme.
• Status: Published
• Refereed: Yes
• Glasgow Author(s) Enlighten ID: Bayes, Dr Ryan and Soler, Professor Paul and Chatzitheodoridis, Gavriil and Nugent, Dr John
• Authors: Bogomilov, M., Tsenov, R., Vankova-Kirilova, G., Song, Y. P., Tang, J. Y., Li, Z. H., Bertoni, R., Bonesini, M., Chignoli, F., Mazza, R., Palladino, V., de Bari, A., Orestano, D., Tortora, L., Kuno, Y., Sakamoto, H., Sato, A., Ishimoto, S., Chung, M., Sung, C. K., Filthaut, F., Jokovic, D., Maletic, D., Savic, M., Jovancevic, N., Nikolov, J., Vretenar, M., Ramberger, S., Asfandiyarov, R., Blondel, A., Drielsma, F., Karadzhov, Y., Boyd, S., Greis, J. R., Lord, T., Pidcott, C., Taylor, I., Charnley, G., Collomb, N., Dumbell, K., Gallagher, A., Grant, A., Griffiths, S., Hartnett, T., Martlew, B., Moss, A., Muir, A., Mullacrane, I., Oates, A., Owens, P., Stokes, G., Warburton, P., White, C., Adams, D., Bayliss, V., Boehm, J., Bradshaw, T. W., Brown, C., Courthold, M., Govans, J., Hills, M., Lagrange, J.-B., Macwaters, C., Nichols, A., Preece, R., Ricciardi, S., Rogers, C., Stanley, T., Tarrant, J., Tucker, M., Watson, S., Wilson, A., Bayes, R., Nugent, J.C., Soler, F. J. P., Chatzitheodoridis, G. T., Dick, A. J., Ronald, K., Whyte, C. G., Young, A. R., Gamet, R., Cooke, P., Blackmore, V. J., Colling, D., Dobbs, A., Dornan, P., Franchini, P., Hunt, C., Jurj, P. B., Kurup, A., Long, K., Martyniak, J., Middleton, S., Pasternak, J., Uchida, M. A., Cobb, J. H., Booth, C. N., Hodgson, P., Langlands, J., Overton, E., Pec, V., Smith, P. J., Wilbur, S., Ellis, M., Gardener, R. B. S., Kyberd, P., Nebrensky, J. J., DeMello, A., Gourlay, S., Lambert, A., Li, D., Luo, T., Prestemon, S., Virostek, S., Palmer, M., Witte, H., Adey, D., Bross, A. D., Bowring, D., Liu, A., Neuffer, D., Popovic, M., Rubinov, P., Freemire, B., Hanlet, P., Kaplan, D. M., Mohayai, T. A., Rajaram, D., Snopok, P., Torun, Y., Cremaldi, L. M., Sanders, D. A., Summers, D. J., Coney, L. R., Hanson, G. G., Heidt, C., and collaboration, M.
• College/School: College of Science and Engineering > School of Physics and Astronomy
• Journal Name: Nature
• Publisher: Nature Research
• ISSN: 0028-0836
• ISSN (Online): 1476-4687
• Published Online: 05 February 2020
• Copyright Holders: Copyright © 2020 The Authors
• First Published: First published in Nature 578(7793): 53-59
• Publisher Policy: Reproduced under a Creative Commons License