Measurement of the increase in phase space density of a muon beam through ionization cooling

Abstract

The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) collaboration seeks to demonstrate the feasibility of ionization cooling, the technique by which it is proposed to cool the muon beam at a future neutrino factory or muon collider. The position and momentum reconstruction of individual muons in the MICE trackers allows for the development of alternative figures of merit in addition to beam emittance. Contraction of the phase space volume occupied by a fraction of the sample, or equivalently the increase in phase space density at its core, is an unequivocal cooling signature. Single-particle amplitude and nonparametric statistics provide reliable methods to estimate the phase space density function. These techniques are robust to transmission losses and nonlinearities, making them optimally suited to perform quantitative measurements in MICE. These novel methods were developed for this thesis and used for the first demonstration of muon ionization cooling through a 65 mm-thick lithium hydride absorber.