MANX, A 6-D Muon Cooling Demonstration Experiment

Most ionization cooling schemes now under consideration are based on using many large flasks of liquid hydrogen energy absorber. One important example is the proposed Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE), which has recently been approved to run at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). In the work reported here, a potential muon cooling demonstration experiment based on a continuous liquid energy absorber in a helical cooling channel (HCC) is discussed. The original HCC used a gaseous energy absorber for the engineering advantage of combining the energy absorption and RF energy regeneration in hydrogen-filled RF cavities. In the Muon And Neutrino eXperiment (MANX) that is proposed here, a liquid-filled HCC is used without RF energy regeneration to achieve the largest possible cooling rate in six dimensions. In this case, the magnetic fields of the HCC must diminish as the muons lose momentum as they pass through the liquid energy absorber. The length of the MANX device is determined by the maximum momentum of the muon test beam and the maximum practical field that can be sustained at the magnet coils. We have studied a 3 meter-long HCC example that could be inserted between the MICE spectrometers at RAL.