Alternative Muon Front-end for the International Design Study (IDS)

We discuss alternative designs of the muon capture front end of the Neutrino Factory International Design Study (IDS). In the front end, a proton bunch on a target creates secondary pions that drift into a capture channel, decaying into muons. A sequence of RF cavities forms the resulting muon beams into strings of bunches of differing energies, aligns the bunches to (nearly) equal central energies, and initiates ionization cooling. This design is affected by limitations on accelerating gradients within magnetic fields. The effects of gradient limitations are explored, and mitigation strategies are presented