PARTICLE PRODUCTION IN THE MICE BEAMLINE

The Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment (MICE) is being built at the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) to test ionization cooling of a muon beam. Successful demonstration of cooling is a necessary step along the path toward creating future high intensity muon beams in either a Neutrino Factory or Muon Collider. Production of particles in the MICE beamline begins with a titanium target dipping into the ISIS proton beam. The resulting pions are captured, momentum-selected, and fed into a 5T superconducting decay solenoid which contains the pions and their decay muons. Another dipole then selects the final particles for propagation through the rest of the MICE beamline. Within the last year, the MICE target has been redesigned, rebuilt, and has begun operating in ISIS. The decay solenoid has also become operational, dramatically increasing the number of particles in the MICE beamline. In parallel, particle identification detectors have also been installed and commissioned. In this paper, the commissioning of the improved MICE beamline and target will be discussed, including the use of Time-of-Flight detectors to understand the content of the MICE beam between 100 and 444 MeV/c.