Search Results (4 total)

We describe the status of our effort to realize a first neutrino factory and the progress made in understanding the problems associated with the collection and cooling of muons towards that end. We summarize the physics that can be done with neutrino factories as well as with intense cold beams of muons. The physics potential of muon colliders is reviewed, both as Higgs factories and compact high-energy lepton colliders. The status and time scale of our research and development effort is reviewed as well as the latest designs in cooling channels including the promise of ring coolers in achieving longitudinal and transverse cooling simultaneously. We detail the efforts being made to mount an international cooling experiment to demonstrate the ionization cooling of muons.

Electron beams with the lowest, normalized transverse emittance recorded so far were produced and confirmed in single-bunch-mode operation of the Accelerator Test Facility at KEK. We established a tuning method of the damping ring which achieves a small vertical dispersion and small x-y orbit coupling. The vertical emittance was less than 1% of the horizontal emittance. At the zero-intensity limit, the vertical normalized emittance was less than 2.8×10^-8 rad m at beam energy 1.3 GeV. At high intensity, strong effects of intrabeam scattering were observed, which had been expected in view of the extremely high particle density due to the small transverse emittance.

The status of the research on muon colliders is discussed and plans are outlined for future theoretical and experimental studies. Besides work on the parameters of a 3–4 and 0.5 TeV center-of-mass (COM) energy collider, many studies are now concentrating on a machine near 0.1 TeV (COM) that could be a factory for the s-channel production of Higgs particles. We discuss the research on the various components in such muon colliders, starting from the proton accelerator needed to generate pions from a heavy-Z target and proceeding through the phase rotation and decay (π→μν_μ) channel, muon cooling, acceleration, storage in a collider ring, and the collider detector. We also present theoretical and experimental R&D plans for the next several years that should lead to a better understanding of the design and feasibility issues for all of the components. This report is an update of the progress on the research and development since the feasibility study of muon colliders presented at the Snowmass '96 Workshop [R. B. Palmer, A. Sessler, and A. Tollestrup, Proceedings of the 1996 DPF/DPB Summer Study on High-Energy Physics (Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, Menlo Park, CA, 1997)].

The KEK Accelerator Test Facility (KEK-ATF) was constructed to develop technologies for producing a low-emittance beam which will be required by future linear colliders. The KEK-ATF consists of an injector linac, a damping ring, and a beam extraction line. The basic optical structure of the damping ring is a FOBO lattice, which reduces the horizontal dispersion at the center of the bending magnets and, as a consequence, can produce an extremely small emittance beam. To verify the performance of such a unique, low-emittance lattice, it is crucial to measure the horizontal emittance. The horizontal emittance was measured using wire scanners in the beam extraction line. Since the horizontal beam position was not stable, we established a method to correct the measured beam size for position fluctuation (“jitter”) and we succeeded in the observation of the so far smallest horizontal emittance in any accelerator. The measured horizontal emittance was 1.37±0.03nm at a beam energy of 1.285 GeV and a bunch population of \(3–5\)×10⁹, in agreement with the design value of 1.27–1.34 nm at the beam energy and the bunch population.