Muon Accelerator Program Simulation Fellow

Muons are fundamental particles like electrons but much more massive. Muon accelerators can provide physics opportunities similar to those of electron accelerators, but because of the larger mass muons lose less energy to radiation, allowing more compact facilities with lower operating costs. The way muon beams are produced makes them too large to fit into the vacuum chamber of a cost-effective accelerator, and the short muon lifetime means that the beams must be reduced in size rather quickly, without losing too many of the muons. This reduction in size is called "cooling." Ionization cooling is a new technique that can accomplish such cooling. Intense muon beams can then be accelerated and injected into a storage ring, where they can be used to produce neutrino beams through their decays or collided with muons of the opposite charge to produce a muon collider, similar to an electron-positron collider. We report on the research carried out at the University of California, Riverside, towards producing such muon accelerators, as part of the Muon Accelerator Program based at Fermilab. Since this research was carried out in a university environment, we were able to involve both undergraduate and graduate students.