MICE: The International muon ionization cooling experiment: Phase space cooling measurement

The MICE Collaboration is building an experiment in which a section of an ionization cooling channel will be exposed to a muon beam. The muons will be produced by the decay of pions from a target dipping into the ISIS proton beam at Rutherford appleton laboratory (RAL). The channel includes liquid-hydrogen absorbers providing energy loss and high-gradient radiofrequency (RF) cavities reaccelerating the particles, all packed into a solenoidal magnetic channel. MICE will reduce the beam transverse emittance by about 10% for muon momenta between 140 and 240 MeV/c. Time-of-flight (TOF) counters, a threshold Cherenkov counter, and a calorimeter will identify background electrons and pions. Spectrometers placed before and after the cooling section will measure the beam transmission and input and output emittances with an absolute precision of 0.1%.