Muon ionisation cooling experiment

Abstract

This thesis describes the Muon Ionisation Cooling Experiment (MICE), an engineering demonstration of the technique of ionisation cooling. It provides a detailed description of the creation of a Geometry Handling System that has been written as part of the MICE Analysis User Software and its benefits in providing a flexible and accurate method to model the MICE experiment. Finally the results of the bench tests of the Electron Muon Ranger will be presented. MICE is part of an international programme to provide the technology for the Neutrino Factory (NF). The NF requires the technology to; capture the muons from a pion beam; cool them to form a high intensity beam with a small emittance; and accelerate the resulting muons. The decay of the resulting monochromatic muon beam produces a neutrino beam with precisely defjned flavour content and an accurately calculable energy spectrum. The μ beam's intensity and collimation is sufficiently high to allow experiments to be performed with a baseline of several thousand km.