Muon Collider Based on Gamma Factory, FCC-ee and Plasma Target

The LEMMA-type muon collider generates muon pairs by the annihilation of 45 GeV positrons with electrons at rest. Due to the small cross section, an extremely high rate of positrons is required, which could be achieved by a ’Gamma factory’ based on the LHC. Other challenges with the LEMMA-type muon production scheme include the emittance preservation of muons and muon-generating positrons upon multiple traversals through a target, and the merging of many separate muon bunchlets. These two challenges may potentially be overcome by (1) operating the FCC-ee booster with a barrier bucket and induction acceleration, so that all positrons of a production cycle are merged into one single superbunch instead of storing ~10,000 separate bunches; and (2) sending the positron superbunch into a plasma target. During the passage of the positron superbunch, the electron density is enhanced 100–1000 fold without any increase in the density of nuclei, so that beamstrahlung and Coulomb scattering are essentially absent. We investigate prospects and difficulties of this approach, including emittance growth due to filamentation in the nonlinear plasma channel and due to positron self-modulation.