Transnational Access to the MICE facility

(Work package 6)

QUICK LINKS
How to apply | MICE Website | Publications | Intranet

Description of the infrastructure:

The MICE facility is a new specialized beam line at the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) ISIS facility at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL). ISIS comprises source, linac, synchrotron and targets normally operated for the production of pulsed neutron and muon beams. The new beam line is equipped with instrumentation to characterize the beam.

The facility was developed for the MICE experiment (Muon ionisation cooling experiment) http://mice.iit.edu/, which is the first experiment to be installed at the new beam line. When fully installed (in 2012/2013), the MICE experiment will allow high-accuracy measurement of emittance, and will deploy unique absorbers and re-acceleration stations to assess the efficiency of ionization cooling.

In more detail:

• The MICE facility offers muon beams of either sign, pulsed at 1 Hz, momentum from 120 MeV/c to 350 MeV/c. Also protons, pions and electrons from 100 MeV/c to 400 MeV/c. Beams are currently available, but will not be at full intensity before 2012.
• The MICE experiment will measure muon ionization cooling. The collaboration is constructing and installing enhanced particle identification (Cherenkov and calorimeter), and precision (50-60 ps) time measurement at three locations. Precision tracking will be provided through axial-field spectrometers equipped with scinitllator-fibre tracking. The ionization cooling will use liquid-hydrogen absorbers, RF cavities, liquid-hydrogen-safe infrastructure, and RF power station with 8 MW peak power at 200 MHz. These items will not be fully available before 2013.

How to apply for MICE access >>

Description of work:

Modality of access under this project: It is expected that a typical experiment or test will take about 2 beam-weeks and will need the presence of up to six external users i.e. external to the MICE facility. More specifically, experimental activity supported will encompass:

• The presence at RAL of external users for equipment delivery and commissioning, data taking, analysis, in support of muon cooling experiments, including the MICE experiment.
• The presence at RAL of external users of the beam for tests of particle physics detectors in a low energy beam.
• The presence at RAL of proponents of new cooling experiments to undertake studies, installation and eventually data taking

Note: to access the facility under the Transnational Access scheme, certain eligibility criteria must be met.

Support offered under this project: The beam will be provided free of charge to the external users, including support for travel and subsistence expenses related to stay at RAL using accommodation on-site or in the local vicinity. STFC RAL operates ISIS on a yearly schedule. The support offered includes the basic infrastructure for the experiments (electricity, network connectivity, office space, internet connections, control room) and the beam operation during the experiments.

Outreach to new users: The access pages on this EuCARD web-site describe the facility, the conditions of access, and the application procedure, these are linked from the MICE website. Advertising has also been made in the EuCARD newsletter (June 2009), the CERN Courier (November 2009), the STFC website [1] [2] (February 2010) and emails to the NEu2012 community (July 2010) and to worldwide muon facilities to pass to their European users (January 2011). Additional Transnational Access advertising will be made e.g. in physics journals, other web sites and via e-mailing to the particle physics community. The results of the experiments using this facility will be presented to the scientific community on a regular basis in workshops and conferences, in synergy with the dissemination activities of WP2.

Selection of applications: A selection panel of outside experts, assisted by MICE scientific and technical management, will review applications and recommend projects for support. Further details of the selection procedure can be found here.