A Slow-Cycling Proton Driver for a Neutrino Factory

An 8 Hz proton driver for a neutrino factory of 4 MW beam power and an energy of 25-30 GeV is under study at CERN, in parallel with a similar investigation using a 2.2 GeV high-energy linac and an accumulator plus a compressor ring cycling at 75 Hz. At RAL, synchrotron drivers with final energies of 5 and 15 GeV cycling at 50 and 25 Hz, respectively, are being studied. With these four scenarios, one hopes to cope with all possible constraints emerging from the studies of the pion production target and the muon rotation and cooling system. The high beam energy of this scenario requires less proton current and could inject into the SPS above transition and upgrade LHC and fixed target physics. Its 440 kW booster would upgrade ISOLDE.The main problems of the driver synchrotron are: the requirement of about 4 MV RF voltage at 10 MHz for acceleration and adiabatic bunch compression to the required r.m.s length of 1 ns; the sensitivity of the compression to the impedance of the vacuum chamber and to non-linearities of the momentum compaction of the high-gt lattice.